The backstory on the buckle that features so prominently in this Alyx collection, and likely all those going forward, is that Matthew Williams was at a Six Flags theme park, where he found himself focusing on the safety belts. He traced the manufacturer to an Austrian town near Innsbruck and started customizing the hardware with Alyx etching, among other color and size specifications. As functional closures for one of his new Mackintosh styles or as decoration on a beret, the buckles look authentically industrial and well-crafted. In these, you can see how Williams’s curiosity and follow-through combined with an obsessive attention to detail has yielded strong branding—in all senses.
Of course, the strength of a collection cannot be built on buckles alone. But as Williams and his wife, Jennifer, who is in charge of sales, shifted attention from a metallic silver muff to pants equipped with useful pouches, utility was ever-present in the designs. His tendency toward reconceiving punk and military codes means that toughness often registers ahead of other attributes such as precise tailoring. For someone who arrived in fashion from a roundabout route only to move his family to Ferrara, Italy, where he is now in close proximity to his suppliers, Williams takes every element seriously. That said, this collection was chockablock with pieces that would be fun to wear. There was the chalk-stripe on suiting that revealed an arrangement of “Alyx” in tiny type. A classic sweater dress accented with a harness definitely qualified as cool. The pairing of a gaping-backed tactical vest over a down-filled jacket looked surprisingly high fashion. Stretchy cuissardes patterned with strass came as a suggestion from Jennifer, who joked that they satisfied her figure skating aspirations. “We’re reinforcing the things we do well,” said Williams. “We just want to have a clear voice and be confident about what we believe in.”
It should be noted that Mackintosh has believed in Williams since early on; and rightly so, as his three new coat styles are pretty great. One features an outward vest covered in an arty, silver-splotched treatment that originated from a photo of surfboard wax; another comes with an inner vest that gives a crisp total look when zipped up. Williams also reintroduced interior leg straps that were useful for riding but now exist as an esoteric flourish. “A lot of the details we do for the wearer,” he said convincingly.
