On a fabulously sunny afternoon in London today, tens of thousands of women and girls—watched and cheered by thousands more men and boys—marched through the streets to celebrate the 100th anniversary of British women winning the long- and hard-fought right to vote. Has there ever been a better reason for a menswear fashion show running late?
Once we’d all trooped in, Hussein Chalayan presented a collection peppered with cleverly radical garments that, appropriately, are offered in-store to both genders. Even more appropriately, many of these garments acknowledged the lineage of male aggression and female resistance via one central reference, the ancient Roman story of the mass abduction and rape of the Sabines—a subject much portrayed in Renaissance art. This grim starting point was reflected in the collars and shoulders on jackets and trenches that hung way back on the body, as if the wearer had been freshly wrenched away.
Opposing this were the symbolically protective strips that ran across up to the shoulder then down across the body on trousers and shorts. These strips—unintentionally reminiscent of the 1918-vintage suffragettes’ sashes—often ended in accentuated pockets or bags integrated into the pants below. Some jackets and macs featured a new-looking high and narrow double-breasted neckline that enforced a sense of self-possession.
Gender conflict was perhaps a counterintuitive point of departure for a collection that was conceived as a cartography of happiness and harmony. Yet as Chalayan explained backstage, he’d started with the Sabines, then set off to tour the compass of his imagination: “The north is very much about the grid system, and nature. The east is preservation and protection. South is hedonism, and a kind of chaos. And West? That’s the individual, reflected in individual silhouettes of the collection itself.” Chalayan’s explorations of tensions are unflinching and often hard to follow, but they produce clothes quite unlike any other designer’s.
