Can Hood By Air...save New York fashion? Can Hood By Air Save New York?! CAN HOOD BY AIR SAVE US?!
In an interview with SSENSE, and a separate interview with Kanye West (casual), Shayne Oliver announced that he is reviving his brand Hood By Air. We don’t yet know when exactly it will return, and whether it will even show clothing at fashion week, but the brand that held the fashion world’s attention rapt, even during periods of hiatus, for six or seven years is on its way back.
Though Oliver’s collections were challenging and impenetrable at the time, looking back at what he did just a few years ago makes it clear how ubiquitous his influence has become. He propelled streetwear—not T-shirts and graphics but garments and ideas and people and attitudes from his life in downtown Manhattan and Brooklyn—into high fashion. He started with menswear, foreshadowing the energy around that sect of the industry. He covered everything in a clean, telegraphic, charged logo—putting the collective brand identity before the personal one. He showed super wild runway fashion but made a T-shirt anyone could wear. He shunned investors or corporate support (except PornHub—also oddly prescient!).
What can Oliver bring to fashion now? All of the things listed above are now practically the playbook for fashion brands, and yet his many imitators are missing essential elements of his work: the aggression, the sexuality (he would often refer to the ideas he put on the runway as what “turned him on”), and the masculinity. When Oliver is putting shirtless queer men in dental guards and unitards on the runway, a Louis Vuitton harness doesn’t look so controversial and a Raf Simons taffeta coat seems a little fussy.
Why is everyone…freaking out about tiny bags?
The hunky young French designer Simon Porte Jacquemus loves to make tiny bags and giant hats, but he took things to a new level of minutiae in Paris this week with the new Mini Le Chiquito, an even smaller version of the Le Chiquito, a previous tiny Jacquemus bag. It’s so small that models carried it in the crook of their...fingers.
Nay- and yeasayers alike are contemplating the impracticality of this bag, which underscores a significant point: when have fashion bags ever been for carrying things? Miss me with your fanny packs, pragmatic nerds! (And hold my phone.)
But why are these bags so small? In part, this is another example of fashion’s ongoing entanglement with meme culture: make something outrageous that inspires the Twitterati to claim that everyone in Soho will really start dressing like an absolute unit (or whatever). And the easiest way to do this is to make something totally huge (Demnacore) or totally tiny (Jacquemuscore). Pick your poison, fashion fanboys!
Tabis are making a comeback...thanks to guys?As predicted on this very website, Tabis are now all over the place and selling like hotcakes. And this isn’t just one of those things were fashion heads say everyone is wearing pompom pants and it’s just us and one guy wearing pompom pants: SSENSE (wow, they are all over the SSCENE today) says their first delivery of men’s Tabis sold out “within days.” Many consider it a Margiela collectible. Somebody let this guy know the revolution has just begun.
https://www.gq.com/story/fashion-news-3-1-19
No comments:
Post a Comment