The literal incorporation of motifs you see on the streets into clothes made to be worn on them is a path well beaten, most recently by Anya Hindmarch and Jeremy Scott. Today Christopher Kane followed this road too, but went at it in entirely his own direction. Well, not quite entirely: Kane’s creative ignition was first turned by the automobile assemblage of John Chamberlain.
The mangled, angled vortices of impact explored by Chamberlain were adapted by Kane as plastic zigzag trims on the pockets of mid-thigh hoodies, the outline of chest panels on double-patterned shirts, and a navy-on-gray sweater. A great concatenation of time-lapse lightning bolts juddered in white down a black tracksuit, and in black up a white mac—a serious look. A montage of jumbled, disordered shapes, like Chamberlain’s work up close, was applied as pattern to knits and intarsia suiting.
Other, non-Chamberlain, street-sourced details included T-shirts dripped with grids of high-visibility green. Dark denim and some fine shearlings—loose, and some of them a touch ’80s—were licked with more lurid shades from the palette of driver awareness. The underside of Kane’s coats’ cuff straps came lined with the type of reflective fabric favored by wary cyclists—one parka was coated in aluminum so rigid when manipulated as to so be sculpt-able by its owner. The silhouette was more freeway than street: Trousers were wide and straight and styled with asymmetrical turn-ups; outerwear verged on the cocoonish. Nylon bombers (very, very well-made), pants, and tees were printed with a great illustration of Chamberlain’s crashed cars. Having not scoured Kane’s rails for a little while, it was a pleasant surprise to see how his once-afterthought menswear output has broadened into a carefully balanced, pretty-much-complete offer.
