Anyone who says that full-on, muscular sporty/street style is dead should’ve been at the raucous fashion show staged by Iceberg’s James Long tonight at Alcatraz, a historic Milan nightspot, with throngs of enthusiastic kids appropriately clad in club attire populating the audience. “I love the idea that the name of the club is also that of a prison,” said the designer, who, inspired by the concept, concocted a sort of narrative where guards break the rules and start to rave with the inmates.
Narratives come and go—what remains after all the blah-blah are the clothes. And Long is definitely making some good ones at Iceberg. He stuck with conviction to the vision he has created for the label, riffing on an endless series of shiny puffa jackets in block colors, ’90s sportswear with military undertones and oversized outerwear, splashed with cleverly spliced and slightly trippy Iceberg logos. Long calls it punk sport.
But what Long really excels at is knitwear; every season he kicks out new versions of Iceberg’s famous sweaters with knitted cartoon characters slashed and spliced apart and re-sketched into un-recognizable, crazy abstract motifs. For this show he upped the ante, working with British artist Eddie Peake on a series of knitted oversized sweaters where the artist’s layer-by-layer technique was translated into bold lettering in vivid colors. They looked absolutely fabulous.
