“Not every stitch means something,” pleaded Hussein Chalayan, a great designer who feels the weight of his greatness, as he riffed through his men’s rail. It was hard to believe him entirely. This partner to his Pre-Fall collection, titled Teutonic, features many of the same elements (as well as a model of the same gender) already seen there: the Autobahn fairy tale “Nowhere Print” (in a padded weekend shirt), the slouchy leather pin-tuck seam pants, the abstract topography of Chalayan’s German source material.
This is the brand’s fourth collection of menswear since Chalayan revived it. He might perhaps consider plighting his troth to a masculine audience more directly, because in his outerwear—that great duffle-hoody-bomber hybrid especially—plus his shirting and tailoring, there is a lot to love. But Chalayan is himself a man of rigid process who delights in an incongruous break on a herringbone jacket or a sublimation of seamlessness through drape and weight. Like a Swiss watchmaker, he sweats about mechanical details the hoi polloi wouldn’t spare a second worrying over. These are hard clothes to glance at and get—the measure of them is achieved in their wearing. Chalayan owns his own business, and more power to him. But you get the sense that with a partner driven by the prosaic urge to sell, sell, sell—a technical outerwear specialist, perhaps—his rather agonized brilliance might benefit from a more casually enunciated expression.
