At the end of this Lanvin show the models rushed back into the square show space from every different direction, striding fast up to whichever bench was in front of them, then swerving at the last to avoid it and rushing off on another tangent. It was chaotic, hyper, high-bandwidth intense; like Grand Central at 5:30 p.m. or Times Square if every tourist had drunk too much coffee, or my head right now sitting outside a café/tabac with 15 minutes to spare before the next two appointments on Vogue Runway’s master menswear spreadsheet.
It was, said Lucas Ossendrijver backstage, too much information. “It’s about the way we get information, the way we need information, nonstop. [In fashion], we are always checking; who’s where, what’s going on, it’s like every day you are waiting for something to happen.” Aargh! He’s right! When did you last check your mail, your WhatsApp, the NYTimes app, your voicemail?
Ossendrijver seemed chilled as he described the now’s endemic lack of chill. But as the sure hand on Lanvin’s menswear tiller for more than a decade, he’s earned his serenity. This collection saw him translate the hyper-fragmentation of modernity into hyper-fragmented clothing: “I didn’t want to fight it, I wanted to see it as a positive. I thought, Why not just embrace and engage?”
For Spring ’18 the Lanvin man leaned into the cacophony wearing a collection that artfully grafted as many menswear genres as there are apps on your phone. The big two were tailoring and military/workwear. So micro-herringbone double-breasted jackets and topcoats featured arms, or pickets, or integrated inner shirts in a lovely surplus green washed cotton. Technical parkas with twisted hood shapes and mesh external pockets to one side of the small of the wearer’s back incorporated treated suiting fabric bonded onto Ossendrijver’s technical templates. Analogue woven panels of chevroned arrows in yellow and violet lined the collars of zip-up fleece-style pullovers and were monochrome decoration on fine-check stadium jackets. There were occasional moments of non-grafted, single-dialect semi-focus—you know, like a nice slouchy black suit—but these were rare and not necessarily necessary. Accessories included a slightly nostalgic duo of shoulder-slung compact camera cases in leather marked with an L and large rectangular box bags, also stamped, so large you could carry countless terabytes of solid-state hard drive in them. Most wistful of all were a shoulder holster bag that contained a flute and a necklace of a carved wooden hand worn above a sleeveless purple knit over a violet short-sleeved shirt. Was Ossendrijver quietly yearning for less pixilated times? Maybe, but this was just gently whispered aside in a collection of clothes to wear while striding masterfully through the modern matrix of more, more, more. Was that all? Maybe—there wasn’t time to talk about how great the sneakers were. So you could go check WWD and BoF: Joelle and Tim might well have seen something totally different.
