A curious thing about this evening's Rag & Bone presentation: The theme du jour was parkour, that pickup sport that sees urban aerialists turning the city into a stage for gravity-defying jumps and flips; meanwhile, the Rag & Bone clothes inspired by the parkourists were shown static, on stick-figure mannequins. Designers David Neville and Marcus Wainwright emphasized flyweight materials, like ultrafine nylon or the perforated mesh used, for instance, in a button-down, or ones that had a sporty give, like the heavy-duty jersey found in an overcoat. There were also lots of straps and flaps meant to pick up a breeze and underline the sense of motion. The tapered trouser silhouette here was another nod to parkour—the last thing a guy running up a wall needs is to trip over his own pant leg—but the military elements and savvy deployment of technical materials was signature Rag & Bone, uncut by external influence. For the record, Neville and Wainwright did in fact road test their clothes on actual parkourists: A video featuring Rag-clad dudes rewriting the laws of physics with their bodies screened at the presentation. But it would have been nice to see these clothes in motion, live.
