When Tommy Ton started taking street style photos outside the runway shows a dozen years ago, models, as a rule, were twiggy teenagers, and more often than not, they were white. And no one was talking about modest clothing.
The widening of fashion’s collective consciousness has been slow, but progress is being made. The runways may not yet reflect the world as it is, with its diversity of color, age, and size, but they’re more representative than at any time in the past. Ton’s street style photos and those of others like him have played their part in fashion’s awakening, alongside the rise of Instagram, the presence of female designers in top jobs, and the consciousness raising of #MeToo and Time’s Up. He has an eye for “real women” with real style, not influencers in head-to-toe runway looks, and his taste runs to the minimal, though it’s not strict. Phoebe Philo’s Céline is a touchstone.
Ton has brought that sensibility with him to Deveaux, the New York menswear label where he took the creative director role a year and a half ago and quickly launched women’s; it’s now bigger than the men’s offering. “The clothing is grounded in reality,” he said of the brand’s first Resort collection. (He’s had it photographed on a 50-something yoga instructor and a 30-something stylist to prove the point.) He added this: “We want to be a modest label.”
While there’s a skin-baring one-shoulder dress and another strappy number with a single swooping “wing” in the back, by and large these pieces would meet the criteria for Net-a-Porter’s new modest clothing section. At Bergdorf Goodman, the label’s exclusive New York department store partner, it will hang next to The Row, Brunello Cucinelli, and other grown-up labels. A safari “shacket” that flared out below a slightly nipped waist was a nice development in the tailoring category, as was a pantsuit cut from raw Japanese denim with vaguely Western styling. Also thoughtful: a two-in-one nylon trench whose sleeves zip off to create a vest. Of the wide selection of “grounded in reality” dresses—“sounds mundane, but we find them inspiring,” Ton said—the most striking was the T-shirt caftan in white cotton ponte.
