The last time Boss—or BOSS, as one should strictly yet shoutily write it—held a menswear show, it was also here in New York, way back when in 2008: a different age, so many of whose certainties are now evaporated. At the tail end of the Dubya years, Boss (sorry, but I refuse to shout) was the predominant global supplier of what then seemed an unimpeachably modern costume for successful modern men. It was a suit, cut tight post–Hedi Slimane, but rendered flexible with elastane and precision German know-how. A Gerard Butler kind of a suit. The total confidence of this label’s name perfectly fit the guileless masculine, hetero-filtered ambition of the time: get a hot job, a hot suit, a hot girlfriend, then season it all with a spritz of Boss Orange.
But now, oh now, how different—both for Boss and beyond. The suiting index has plummeted, something reflected in Boss’s recent results. The wider world views that executive uniform with ambivalence. We do not necessarily get the Boss we signed up for.
Thus tonight represented a refresh under Ingo Wilts, a long-term servant of the house who recently returned for his third tour of duty. Some 90 percent of Hugo Boss income is generated by menswear, but for several years its fashion-level emphasis has been on womenswear. Despite Jason Wu’s excellent work, that seems a commercially incongruous focus.
Instead of mid-aughts exec, the suiting was broader of shoulder, single vented, with mid-width lapels, and played against double-pleated pants cuffed, low-rise, and with plenty of break. Wilts had accurately observed the appropriate silhouette for 2017. Yet this suiting was anything but conventional. For not only did it utilize fabrics of a provocatively anachronistic heaviness, boiled cashmere included, it mixed them with rough (but luxuriously so) wearable declarations of utilitarianism. Windbreakers, half-zipped, with an unorthodox arrangement of three billow pockets at the chest, were layered under faux-Guernsey knits. There were some seriously analog hobnailed shoes, with external tongues Wilts had riffed on from a vintage buy. Duffles, either exceptionally low or exceptionally high, were presented with metal fastenings and leather beltlets instead of togs. Hoodies were bluntly silhouetted yet sophisticatedly rendered in reverse shearling with goat hoods.
Hugo Boss is a big, hundreds of millions’ big, company. So it was all the more interesting here how assertively Boss flirted with heaviness and roughness. Each look was fitted to its model and garlanded with a label bearing the label’s signature. This was a collection that tried to say the Boss man does not roll off the production line identically outfitted. He has texture and depth, plus a sense of the then that makes his sense of the now make sense.
