“It’s giving daddy,” a friend and colleague texted as the first looks of Louis Gabriel Nouchi’s collection hit the runway. The designer’s work is grounded in his constant interrogation of virility and masculinity, and he’s become known for his well-rounded show castings. Today’s presentation included a wide range of sizes and ages (including the daddy in question), something rare in menswear these days.
Each season Nouchi bases his collection on a book. Fall was built around Brett Easton Ellis’s American Psycho, and this season it was Christopher Isherwood’s A Single Man. On the surface, this allows Nouchi to play within the predetermined limits of a story, but also it enables him to explore different facets of masculinity through familiar characters (the psycho finance dude, the emotional gay man). If fall was about aggression and violence, spring is about loss and emotion. “I wanted to continue the study of masculinity, but expand it,” Nouchi said at a preview. “A Single Man is very different from American Psycho, but they’re both reflections of how we see masculinity in society.”
If you’re reading this review, you shouldn’t need a refresher on Isherwood’s novel—there’s an Oscar nominated adaptation directed by Tom Ford, after all. But the gist is that the protagonist is grieving the sudden death (via car-crash) of his long-time partner, and, in the course of a day, he encounters different people who bring him life in their own ways. Nouchi started and ended at the crash scene, and was refreshingly both literal and esoteric in his approach. To his credit, there were no Ford adaptation callbacks, no cream cashmere sweater no matter how good Nicholas Hoult looked in it.
What we did see were car references: seatbelt-like logo webbing around the waists of singlets (a surprising trend this season), a silver jacquard resembling metal, a shawl collar coat in waxed leather (“polished, so it looks like a car”), a stunning wrinkled top in the same material to mimic the car after the crash, and even a car door worn as a shoulder bag. It’s true that sometimes the details felt too obvious, but Nouchi did well by scattering them as reminders to viewers that there’s a set narrative without overwhelming us.
It’s with the abstract that he told the clearest story. Some t-shirts were cut with a pulled neckline that revealed the shoulder, a nod to the shoulder being an erotic zone in the book. Nouchi also deftly draped knots into t-shirts and button-downs, making some of his most special pieces out of the most mundane shapes. “I placed them by the heart, where we store our sorrow,” he said. And underneath it all was a collection rooted in strong and effective tailoring. The silhouette was borrowed from the ’60s, he said, which is when the novel is set, though the broad shoulders and wide trousers hit closer to the ’80s. But chronological purism aside, the silhouette Nouchi was exploring—wide shoulders (sometimes sleeveless), nipped waist, elongated body—stood out in a season with an abundance of tailored jackets and shorts. Also relevant today? The designer’s knack for athleisure.
The takeaway from this show is that Nouchi knows exactly who he’s making clothes for (mostly, but not only, gay men, that is). But as focused as his eye is, his vision isn’t exclusive: It was giving daddy, sure, but also twink, and jock, and bear, and whatever else you fancy. These clothes go beyond the archetypes Nouchi examines. That’s the charm behind LGN: Nouchi’s gay gaze is all-encompassing. Everyone’s invited.
