Outside the Grand Paiais the Sunday crowd was being divided into two queues, those here to see the Toulouse-Lautrec exhibition and those here to see Dunhill. The Toulouse-Lautrec-ers probably didn’t walk away disappointed, but the Dunhill minority were well-served too: this was Mark Weston’s strongest collection since joining the brand in 2017.
Why? Much of it was thanks to what he and his team had stripped away. The styling felt less self-conscious. The overt and unappetizing branding was largely cut. There was also less reliance on ironic ugliness to channel daddy Dunhill’s old school style—all hard-shouldered plaid jackets, moustaches, gold lighters, brown cars and dolly birds. Today the incorporation of that old to express this version of new was executed with much more nuance and lightness of touch.
That’s not to say that there weren’t de trop moments here, but when they happened they worked. The shiny-cuffed trousers and trenches in black, red and teal—as a well as the gloves—were all made from strips of eel skin. Whatever your feelings about eels (delicious in Japanese cuisine) these were extravagantly fashioned pieces. The results, however, like much in here, swam closer to the depths of sophisticated restraint rather than the frothy shallows of excess.
This was a very dark and tailored collection but—with the exception of a few ‘put a strap on it’ overcoats that already seem anachronistically 2019—the sartorial pieces were often cleverly deformalized by the garments they were partnered with. There were some highly clever and attractive details such as the chisel toed loafers featuring hardware that riffed on steel linked watch bracelet closures—catnip to a certain flavor of geezer—and the updating of old school accessory codes to encompass contemporary soon-to-be-obsolescence’s such as EarPods. Dunhill has been quite meh for years now, but tonight there was a hint of a spark—like a desperately struck Rollagas hitting unlikely flint on a windy night—of something potentially hot.
