From a see-through truck parked in Union Square, Scott Sternberg and his merry band staged their latest assault on fashion-show orthodoxy. (It reminded you that another West Coast provocateur, Ken Kesey, and his Merry Pranksters had also used a bus as the base from which to thumb their noses at convention.) Sternberg, plainly, is tired of the menswear runway show. Last season he installed a model in the window of a Paris gallery for three days of constant surveillance by a live-streaming Internet crowd. This time around it was an interactive scavenger hunt, live from the streets of New York. Two male models—Matt Hitt and Miles Garber, label favorites both—facing off against each other, completing challenges, and stopping back at mission control to change into the collection's next outfit, take photos, and tally their scores: a happy Hunger Games. (The numbers behind the models in these photos are their running counts; Hitt eventually won.) The whole was live-streamed, tweeted, Instagrammed, Tumblr'ed: fashion show 2.0.
The collection itself, as it appeared over the course of the day, was similarly future-looking. "It started with this idea of an urban utopia," Sternberg said. "If I could build a city from scratch, what would everybody wear? What do the workers look like? What do the jocks look like?" As it turned out, the workers looked a bit like jocks and the jocks a bit like the workers. Suiting and sportswear cross-pollinated: A heavy, double-breasted suit in cavalry twill had ribbed sweat suit cuffs and pockets. Sternberg's go-to move is the tweak. "What can I do to classic pieces to make them more desirable?" he asks himself. He beefed up a windbreaker by making it in corduroy and lining it with shearling. Everything the same, but different. Reinventing the wheel isn't the Band priority. That much was clear when a wool piqué tux came on the scene. Devotees might recognize the fabric as one first used in a collection six or seven years ago. But when a new fabric delivery this season didn't work out and a bolt of the old stuff was still on the shelf, back in it went. Newer were several map-printed pieces created in collaboration with the L.A. artist Sam Durant. They came on tees and pajama sets.
If there's any complaint to be made about Band's brave new runway-free world, it's that it can be tough to follow in the moment for those without the liberty for a quick 12 hours of scavenger hunt. But that's splitting hairs. The collection's already been to market, reportedly with record success, so now's the time for play. What other message could you gather from the thronged burgers-and-whiskey cocktail party that rounded out game day?
