By his own admission, Eytys creative director Max Schiller has the luxury of pretty much designing what he feels like at a given moment, without having to put it into context. That taste for experimentation applies to his personal life, too: Having become a father last year, he wanted to rock out a bit more so he dyed his hair turquoise at a salon in Saigon (it didn’t work out so well). On the day we meet, he was sporting gunmetal nail polish (it looked cool).
Eytys tends to attract a young, like-minded consumer. “People discover us and want to explore the universe directly through us,” offered the brand’s co-founder, Jonathan Hirschfeld.
This fall, Schiller is offering them a handful of hybrid pieces he described as “erasing the line between utopia and dystopia.” That’s proving a recurring theme here and he translated it, variously, into a striped bomber/puffer/biker jacket, fluid trousers done in lining material, and prints inspired by the Jamiroquai classic “Virtual Insanity” which, let’s face it, predates a good part of the brand’s base. So, too, does the work of Japanese artist Yosuke Onishi, whose hyper-realistic illustrations are reproduced on t-shirts. Those will probably move fast. A faux-vintage jacket in the classic Barbour style nodded to social signifiers favored by old-money aristocrats. Clever details included zip pulls inspired by vintage hotel keychains that bore the name Hotel Fantasia and a slogan cribbed from another rock classic about checking out anytime you like. Meanwhile, Eytys is known above all for its shoes and the spiky new Fugu (as in the venomous blowfish) style is something their follows will probably clamor to check out, too.