Jens Laugesen may be London's best object lesson in sticking to your guns. In the late nineties when Helmut Lang was God, this Danish-born designer started working, like many others, on edgy tailoring. Then Lang disappeared, and Laugesen's minimal suiting experiments elicited minimal interest. Now, though—in a season when the young London fashion crowd is turning up at the shows in variations on sharp tailoring—his persistence may finally pay off.
In this century, Stefano Pilati has sparked the renewed interest in jackets. In other words, it's tux time again. That puts Laugesen's narrow gold lamé jacket with black satin revers and his white A-line dinner jacket in the frame. He's also thought about what to wear beneath them to create the right leggy proportion: The solution is a hybrid of woven fabric and Lycra that looks newer than leggings.
Laugesen's dissections of men's formalwear into boleros, vests, and bib-front shirts were all strong, but he should've either stopped there, or pushed it further. The second half of the show wandered off into a far less convincing dalliance with dresses and Cardin-like circle cutting. Why? If he concentrated on what he's good at, his message would be far stronger.
