At first, it seemed strange that Sportmax chose as its soundtrack the very same “bit of the old Ludwig van”—Beethoven’s 9th Symphony—that featured so prominently not only in A Clockwork Orange but also last month’s (outrageously good) Undercover menswear collection.
Yet, once the models completed their rangy traipses up and down the elevated runway of blush sand, it sort of made sense: This was a gang of 21st-century female droogs who had wrought ultraviolence upon the hallowed citadel of menswear suiting for their own fashion gratification. A gray jacket had its arms slashed from its body, and a blue jacket front—itself most probably the victim of some other tussle—thrust upon it. Two more jackets had been mercilessly razored at the waist to provide each side of a jacket-skirt beneath a nylon shirt masquerading as a white one. When there was a fully functioning two-piece, albeit one hybridized from a wool in two shades of gray, it seemed an act of relative mercy (that looked good).
Impressive here were the round-shouldered outerwear pieces engineered in a wool-cashmere mix in navy or gray that lent a tough, pumped-up shot of steroids to the silhouette. The most prominent examples were a blue bomber with a shearling-paneled front worn above a three-split matching skirt and a full-length gray jacket. It wasn’t solely suiting that was adapted from menswear and then attacked from a fresh direction: In black or caramel leather, there was a great deal of luxury harnessing and tactical wear, sometimes worn separately, or not, as with two raincoats into which were integrated jerkin-like leather inserts—which will surely get rain-stained if ever worn in a storm. Combined with the fabric baseball caps and high leather boots, all the holstering and harnessing sometimes made these seem like directional paramilitary attire. The new Marcolin-made Sportmax eyewear looked convincingly future-facing, and the sock sneakers left attractively ergonomic patterns in the shifting sands below.