Joseph is in a transitional period. Its long-standing creative director Louise Trotter has left, and her incoming replacement Susana Clayton will not show her first men’s collection until Spring 2020 (how weird it is to think about 2020 only a week into 2019).
So as things change over, the management at Joseph played it easy for Fall; they checked off a list of fail-safe menswear sartorial codes with tailoring, military, hints of ’70s-era silhouettes, and mostly muted colors all included. That may sound a bit boring, but the often convincing thing with Joseph is that, even though it looks straightforward at first glance, there are usually details that give its offerings a little something extra. This is helpful in a consumer landscape where it feels like there is so, so much of the same thing available, from high street to the high end.
Layered trenches, a puffa greatcoat with argyle-mimicking topstitching, and a sleek jogger pant with a raised cargo pocket at the very top of the left thigh were the best in show, or at least the most singular. Everything else was par for the course, but Joseph is not a brand that’s going to opt for fireworks over reliability.
