Daiki Suzuki’s cult-followed collections for Engineered Garments—the label he launched nearly 20 years ago and still makes in New York’s Garment District—exist in a universe all their own. More engineered than designed, as pledged right in the name, they’re simply tweaked from season to season, rather than conjured anew, to create an oeuvre forever in progress. Fall was no exception, a robust, evolved, considered product of the Japanese-American designer’s clever imagination, all the more so worked within a traditional menswear framework of suits and coats. Shown to press and buyers just a week into a certain, if totally uncertain, administration, it also served as a welcome respite from the turmoil engulfing the outside world.
Which isn’t to say there wasn’t a political element. It was just of the symbolic variety, such as a pin-striped jumpsuit borrowed from an old photo—vintage black-and-white photography was a theme—of the tyrant slayer Winston Churchill in a similar jumpsuit and snakeskin loafers. Lose the snakeskin, and the look feels remarkably current, even on a group of silver-haired models cast locally, as in neighborhood shops. Elsewhere, a recurring workwear vibe took on renewed urgency, in the form of heavyweight duffle coats, olive overalls, long aprons, ponchos and parkas, rumpled denim and corduroy, drifter hats, and blankets worn over coats. One of those blankets,a
re-creation of the Stars and Stripes in gray scale, struck an appropriately ominous tone.
Suzuki is an experimentalist by nature. He loves delving into twill serge, worsted melton, double-face sateen, and other heavy-duty fabrics—much of them hailing from Woolrich Mills in Pennsylvania, where he once acted as creative director—in order to subvert their original purpose and find new applications. For Fall, sleeve linings had been turned inside out, so that the shiny quilted part was on the outside, unhidden. One coat liner was worn sans coat, and a Prince of Wales pattern had been deconstructed and enlarged to jumbo proportions. High-tops and boat shoes in collaboration with Timberland were fitted with chunky lug soles, in one of several footwear collabs that also included Dr. Martens, Danners, and Tricker’s. A sense of controlled randomness permeated throughout. Fabrics, from block to floral prints, were cut arbitrarily from the bolt, meaning they wouldn’t line up perfectly, or at all, on any given piece, making each one unique. This is exactly Suzuki’s method: to find rhythm and order amid chaos and disorder.
