“I don’t like artifice for artifice’s sake,” said Mark Weston down a Zoom this morning from Dunhill’s London studio. “But when you start to look at processes, and you look at the abstraction in them before they are fully formed, that in itself has a beauty. To show that transmits a sense of craft and a sense of identity.” Before it was a menswear marque or anything else, this brand started life as a maker of motoring accessories. In this collection Weston popped Dunhill’s hood to show the mechanics of the house’s expertise that would usually be hidden under impeccable finishing.
Fabrics conventionally used in the innards of a jacket—Silesian cotton, collar canvas, horsehair, Holland linen—were given their moment in the sun in a series of six semi-constructed jackets whose apparently unfinished state made them this season’s finished article. Explaining his yen for inside out, Weston cited the high-tech architecture of Richard Rogers—the Centre Pompidou in Paris, or Lloyd’s building in London—that expressed the vital organs of the building as its exterior ornament. Wrap jackets, shirts, and reverse-pleated peg-leg trousers also hinted at a Japanese sensibility and looked good against an otherwise mostly monochrome collection when expressed in a print based on layered resprays of paint on metal paneling.
There were more conventionally complete pieces, such as a boxy-shoulder evening jacket in silk ottoman with covered buttons, but this collection looked freshest when Weston excavated the space between menswear’s genres, as in “sartorial-utility” tailoring-detail bombers. You don’t have to be a fashion shrink to work out why the notion of a collection whose parts were presented as unfinished, as if frozen in time at the point of some great interruption, ended up being the product: After all, this was a season interrupted as never before. It also gave the impression that hiatus had presented hitherto unseen territories for Weston to explore at Dunhill.
