At fashion’s original collective of (apparently) egoless designers, the project of repetitive provocative disruption continues. Today’s installment? Well, the conventionally more wearable pieces included taupe, gray check, and eggplant-touched brown topcoats and tailoring that sometimes featured the excellent eye-snagger of two slashes from each side of the skirt that chopped the pockets in two. You’re never supposed to use those pockets anyway—it ruins the line of the jacket—so the loss of storage was well worth the aesthetic gain. The duffle coat—again!—loomed large in this collection, too; In navy wool it was slashed by two long vents that were reconcilable by jute; in camel it came sleeveless with a skirt that gave good swish. There was a distantly related moto jacket—very distantly—that acquired a fishtail train via the by-popper addition of a pair of moto-pants to its hem.
The leery twist to all this came via Lycra-tight bike shorts, racerback wrestling costumes, and black jerseys flashed with orange that exhorted us to shine. With chunky boots and under distressed knit or a treated olive bomber, that Lycra emanated grunge-touched Technotronic. Over the coated pants in panels of slick black or milky white, the wrestling suits—and, to be fair, the “Shine” top, too—looked totally top-of-the-bus, sweat-drenched, Love Parade eye-roller. This felt at times rather twisted-by-numbers, but there was the odd unsettling rush to relish, too.
