“Historically, Perry has always been a bit non-prescriptive. It’s not obviously like, ‘Oh, he’s going to the office’ or ‘He’s going out of town.’ The look has been more, maybe, off—more of a mix,” said Perry Ellis’s creative director, Michael Maccari, this morning, surveying his Spring collection.
What that translated to was an expansion of his catalog, so to speak—from the baseline, including a subtly cool khaki pima cotton T-shirt paired with matching shorts, to the more graphic and grabby, like a neoprene sweater printed with a heavy
primary-colored ink pattern.
In that simple-to-statement swath, Maccari kept his “mix” front and center. He included wide-leg nubby denim and on-trend flyaway belts; striped polos over windowpane-lattice shorts; and generously broken and pooling trousers. Footwear, too, was a hybrid between gym and dress—we liked tan suede sneakers that could almost double as bucks.
Maccari does a good job of keeping the aesthetic accessible enough for the Perry Ellis client—the company won’t ever be a fashion mover and shaker. Though, in a way, the most streamlined stuff here was the most fashionable stuff for Spring. That khaki tee-and-shorts combo was the chicest thing we’ve seen so far at New York Fashion Week: Men’s. Low-key but highly covetable.
