The bench of British editors seated across the soaringly beautiful marble runway at Maison Margiela were already a picture of post-Brexit misery. Yet as the first chords of Leonard Cohen’s “Last Year’s Man” were strummed over the PA, their faces fell further.
This pretty quintessential Margiela menswear collection nicely fitted the mood of a day in which what was last night unthinkable was this morning horribly real. The clothes were the product of the exquisite agony of disruption: guts-on-the outside suiting, quartered Chelsea boots, shirts half-tacked irregularly together by hook and eye, pants turned up as an afterthought. Oversize MA1s worn over knits pulled down over short shorts that gave the impression of mini skorts and some rib-knit shorts attached at the front by popper to a racer-back crop-back tank top were considerably subversive. Hokey hunting illustrations—hounds pursuing mallards—graced fluid silk shirts worn over
paper bag–cinched olive pants.
These images returned on pants worn below an off-lime textured blazer with four patch pockets at each hip. What was once together was untogether. On Margiela’s runway it looked convincing, alluring, interesting. That didn’t cheer the Brits up, of course. Certainly not this one.
