They played “Unfinished Sympathy” by Massive Attack as Lucas Ossendrijver’s last look in this powerfully good Lanvin collection passed by. Why so good? Perhaps nowhere else in menswear this season has a designer delivered such a compelling catalogue of inventively nonderivative product (buyer and stylist catnip) via such a singular, sensitive, and relevant thought process (critic catnip).
To track Ossendrijver’s progress through that set of pole-born spotlights, the starting point was “the most unwanted and unloved garment that there is at the moment: the suit.” The first eight or so looks used English-milled wools—plain, check, stripe—to deliver reduced then rebuilt versions of the two-piece staple that Ossendrijver observed has long been reliable masculine camouflage: “You wear a suit when you want to blend in.” Jackets were elongated into overcoats, lent extra strength with two volumizing pleats running from behind the shoulder to the top of the knee and peppered with technical pockets. Sometimes they were worn layered under down-filled, semi-detached gilets or rain cloaks in off-pattern suiting fabrics; it was unclear where one garment ended and another began. A jacket bled into the dungarees above and below it. Insertions of shearling, flashes of more organic pattern at the neckline, and galvanized suede high-tops with technical lacing all served to surprise the eye still further in this redrawing of tailoring’s camouflage template from something set in stone to a new and constantly fluctuating proposition.
Slowly the métier shifted from formal to less so, and the pieces became more explicitly ruggedized and outdoorsy. Treescape camouflage photo prints were mixed and matched on shirting and bowling bags, or cut into outerwear alongside segments of shearling. Cut-into knitwear was tilted across the body. There were jackets in sliced panels of suede with moleskin pockets and D-ring detailing impressed with little pearlescent and steel beads, others in a hand-crocheted leaf relief, and long coats of double-faced, striped blanket material worn over fleece V-neck vests with primitive patterning. The camouflage was the variousness of it all, the diversity, all jumbled in vivid harmony but so mixed up as to defy categorization. Some of the bulkily asymmetrical outerwear that Ossendrijver is so proficient in had the word someday printed at the sleeve or skirt. What was that about? “It’s from a phrase we used a lot, a phrase we came across: ‘Someday this pain will be useful.’ ”
That was Ovid, originally; a bit of a downer for sure, but a call for resilience, too. “It’s such an uncertain time, and in uncertain times you have to be stronger,” as the designer put it. This collection was no wallow in the mire, but an exploration of how masculine codes might be ripped apart and reformed to suit a new world without dismissing the best of the old. “It is a little bit like a slap in the face,” said Ossendrijver, adding, “Fashion can make us feel better . . . can be uplifting.” As pieces of anti-uniform for masculinity due a reset, these were persuasive templates.
