This fall collection marks a new beginning of sorts for Rag & Bone. Marcus Wainwright, the brand’s founder, has found his way back to the design floor. “It’s much more pushed from what we’ve been doing,” he said at a showroom appointment. A quick look around backed that up. The label had perhaps strayed somewhat from its English haberdashery, military, and workwear roots in the wake of the streetwear tsunami, like so many of its peers.
Here, the first thing you noticed was the renewed attention to tailoring, which included suits in a lived-in brushed worsted wool, “not too precious or crisp”; welt knit jackets that wear like cardigans; and an excellent Harris Tweed top coat. The label is introducing an outerwear program that riffs on old M42 army sleeping bag that Wainwright picked up years ago, and the technical parka it inspired is also sharp-looking. There was even a collaboration with—wait for it— Laura Ashley. Wainwright appreciates the irony of the partnership; Laura Ashley is so quintessentially English.
“I never started this as a business,” he said of Rag & Bone’s mid-aughts beginnings. But a business it became, and a pretty substantial one, too. Wainwright had been wearing many hats, especially after the departure of his former partner David Neville, but he says he’s happiest when he’s designing. “The idea was always to make clothes where you could feel what had gone into them,” Wainwright explained. “I don’t know that we’ve always achieved that, but it’s the goal.”
