Only once before, at a bespoke Neapolitan tailor which if memory serves was Rubinacci, has this correspondent ever seen a garment that incorporated a cigar carrier. That was a safari jacket made several decades ago for an exacting Texan customer who liked to keep his Cubans available for a quick draw at all times.
Hussein Chalayan does not smoke cigars and is more Hoxton than Texan. Yet he is nothing if not committed to his process. So before setting off on the research trip to Cuba that informed both this and his Resort '16 womenswear, he had a puff or two. "I felt so ill, man! It was almost…fleshy." Tobacco was not the only intoxicant that wreathed itself around Chalayan while preparing this collection. "I like the idea that Cuba has its own sense of time and its own momentum…constantly there is an interplay of tropical, Hispanic, African."
Apart from those cigar harnesses, the designer's time in Cuba's cast-in-aspic, flawed but inspiring shot at anticapitalist utopia osmosed itself into the collection in ways both literal and conceptual. That strange, multibodied ant-line character is called the "Plonk" and was found by Chalayan in the British Library, then licensed and redrawn as a sort of simplistic cipher for the designer's own progress. The dancing couple jacquard; the tobacco-toned, military-touched (but by no means Castro-homaged) short suit; and an excellent statistic print all nodded to the befuddling cocktail of mystique and propaganda that for decades shrouded this isle. Travel collections have been a choice—and sometimes blatantly lazy—trope of this menswear season, but nowhere else did you feel as close to an imagined destination as here.
