Hed Mayner feels like he has a handle on things, despite a broken leg. If the past year has taught us anything, he pointed out, it’s that there’s beauty to be found in flexing to the moment.
The dynamic between inside and outside—the need to isolate on one hand and what he sees on the streets of Paris or Tel Aviv, on the other—led him to paring things down and meandering through the possibility of line or the language of fabric. “Tailoring can take you into a process where you obsess over the perfect jacket. What I’m trying to do is keep something askew,” the designer noted in a Zoom interview. Comfort dressing in slouchy, cozy fabrics was already Mayner’s home turf. This season, he’s expanded that sensibility and reframed it with ample yet tailored silhouettes and more traditional materials, like fluid Italian wools and English tweeds. For the first time, he ventured into double-faced fabrics, for example in a military-inspired coat that, thanks to a simple slit in back, can also be worn as a cape (a quilted puffer reprised that idea too).
He also went to town on proportion, stripping away lapels, elongating tops, dropping hems, and toying with asymmetry, bell sleeves, major shoulders, and trousers that sit high on the waist. Those might be tucked into a long, slouchy boot or quite simply cropped above the ankle, judo-style, and paired with a big-buckled shoe. The effect was often sculptural, and warm hues of ivory, rust, camel, butter, and olive green added to the feeling of gentle ease.
Mayner said that his loyalists tend to pick a total look, then break it down and make it their own. One of his pastimes is following them to see what they’ve come up with. Come fall, they’ll have a lot to play with.