When it comes to menswear, Matthew M. Williams deploys his specifically evolved aesthetic to conjure fresh answers to a fundamental fashion question: What is unavailable to purchase that men want to wear today? Or as he puts it: “For me, menswear is so much about wardrobing—about finding that perfect thing that you can’t always buy.”
What renders something perfect yet elusive is determined by the way in which its owner wishes to wear it. As Williams points out, archetypical garments are often cut to be worn in a certain manner that is not necessarily current. Many button-up shirts, for instance, are cut to fit close to the body and neck in order to be worn under a jacket in the confines of a tie. “But if you want to find a shirt with a sleeve drop and neck opening that allows it to be won in a casual way—and I like to wear mine over a t-shirt—then that’s more challenging.” Thus this bridge collection contained just such a button-up.
Menswear reshapes itself under pressure from two competing forces: tradition and revolt. Williams’s most-used recipe for adapting his designs to those meandering forces is to re-order the layers and proportions of his looks, while mixing traditionally cloistered menswear genres into each other. He then often adds hardware to taste. Examples here included placing a carefully oversized tailored jacket over a ’90s-wide skate pant bedecked with punkish, cinching metal fixtures, or fixing a ’50s-origin biker with a ’90s-origin technical zippering array and then placing it over a breaky straight-legged workwear-silhouette pant. These looks and more came strapped with crossbody versions of the house Voyou bag.
Said Williams: “I like to develop things that might seem simple. But in actuality I don’t know where you can buy these pieces. That’s why in this collection I was working to create a balance between a strong fashion proposal that’s directional and a series of timeless and elevated wardrobing pieces that I want to wear, and which I would have trouble finding anywhere.” Anywhere, that is, apart from Givenchy.
