Brioni

Masculinity in the Age of Gucci
New-york-fashion-week.jpgconor-mcgregor.jpgIs fashion-consciousness becoming a marker of traditional masculinity?

My current style obsessions are unlikely characters. Tattooed, buzzcut, and resplendent in their bad attitudes, designer Justin O’Shea and UFC posterboy Conor McGregor are not only the best dressed men at the moment, but the best dressed people, period. They are having an inordinate amount of fun with clothes and have honed in on really interesting personal styles – excruciatingly perfect tailoring with a hint of chavvy toughness that is a delight to behold. Australian O’Shea leans a little more biker and fearlessly incorporates truly insane patterns and ’70s silhouettes into his daily looks, while Irish McGregor is more of a dandy who loves flashy accessories, especially from his beloved Gucci, and uses style as conspicuous consumption tool to communicate his wealth, professional success, and brash confidence.

Typically, the well dressed men of today are urbane, wearing beautifully tailored suits of muted colors — think Johannes Huebl. These men look refined, but their clothing is ultimately utilitarian and not a form of self or creative expression. O’Shea and McGregor on the other hand are peacocking with their clothes – pocket squares! fashion glasses! fur! – in a way we don’t typically see with men. Is theirs an expression of enlightened thinking about masculinity and fashion?

There are no two ways about it – O’Shea and McGregor are tough guys. McGregor beats people up for a living. They are in insane physical condition, tattooed to the hilt, and exude an air that indicates that they are not to be messed with. They are not droll, artistic, Oscar Wilde-type dandies. They are knuckle-cracking, beer swigging dandies. It is unusual, then, for them to be so committed to and downright giddy about their clothes – a quality that is typically imagined as a distinctly feminine grace. How are they both so traditionally masculine, and at the same time, total fashionistas?

I think a significant amount of credit for this ought to be paid to Alessandro Michele of Gucci, who is making menswear fun. Gucci’s quirky luxe fabrics, zany patterns, and quirky appliques, are both playful and tasteful, making it so much more enjoyable for men to get dressed. This fun factor and coolness of the brand might ease any generalized anxieties about appearing too “feminine” by enjoying fashion.

There is a history, too, of tough guys loving clothes. Teddy Boys in the 1950s, Mods of the 1960s, Punks of the 1970s, and rappers through to the present day were all obsessed with the details of their clothes; Mods in particular spent hours doing their hair and tailoring their pants to be as narrow as possible (Colin MacInness documents this well in Absolute Beginners). Communicating a certain cultural stance is paramount in the way these subcultures approached clothes. For MacGregor fashion is certainly part of his larger-than-life persona, but I think both he and O’Shea want to communicate confidence and uniqueness over any sort of cultural or political stance. Their love of fashion very personal: it’s tied to self-expression and completely unmoored from any kind of group “look”.

This injection of self-assurance and individuality into imaginative dressing makes me hope that instead of creating a Guccified subculture, O’Shea and McGregor are instead the beginning of a shift in cultural attitudes towards menswear and men enjoying clothes. Perhaps one day masculinity will be equated with sartorial fun and confidence – and not just clothes as a status symbol, but real enjoyment – instead of a shyness and around spending time and effort on appearance. In the meantime I will be scrolling through these guys’ Instagrams until my I go cross-eyed and imagining what it would be like to date them. And go shopping with them.

Ecce! One million photos.

The Triumph of The Non-Designer: Justin, Alexa and More
Alexa Chung and Justin O’Shea, fashion’s most exciting new designers, are not designers at all, depending on whom you ask.

 

Justin O’Shea, former buying director of MyTheresa and the coolest, most hard-boiled guy in the fashion business, debuted his first collection for luxury menswear label Brioni this month to enormous success: the ultra-cool collection for men and women was sexy, immaculate, and exuded an almost Tom Ford-level of slickness. O’Shea has taken an uncompromisingly “lad” approach to the brand – Brioni logoed beer cans were omnipresent at the event and Metallica fronts the new ad campaign – but in a way that’s sophisticated, self-aware, and almost retro without seeming kitchy. He’s proven himself to be a fantastic creative director, even if he is not a typical choice to helm a luxury label, because he gets brand so completely.

O’Shea’s brilliant debut was the perfect backdrop for Alexa Chung to announce that she is launching her own clothing line in the spring of 2017, to the desperate, raucous joy of young women everywhere. The brand will encompass everything from denim to eveningwear, and follows on the heels of Chung’s multiple collaborations with a wide range of brands – she’s collaborated on design for Marks & Spencer, AG Denim, Madewell, Maje, and cosmetics brand Eyeko; and has served as a brand ambassador for Mulberry, Longchamp, and most recently Gucci, when she temporarily took over the label’s Snapchat. But instead of drawing a parallel between Chung and O’Shea, rock-and-roll, much beloved fashion outsiders, The New York Times wondered if Chung might, with her long-hoped for eponymous line, become Britain’s Tory Burch – a theory predicated upon the fact that neither woman were trained as designers.

Chung and Burch could literally not be more opposite. This comparison is incredibly sexist (O’Shea got no press so insulting), out of touch, and the most offensive thing I’ve ever heard for several reasons, most egregiously so because Tory Burch is anti-fashion in the way that Michael Kors is: it’s what upper middle class women wear when they want to be invisible and embarrassingly nondescript; it’s a giant empire of nothing. Alexa Chung is all about individuality and instincts when it comes to her personal style and the kinds of things she has designed and endorsed in the past. Why on earth would she want to be anything, anything like Tory Burch? In terms of contemporaries, the Times should have likened her, obviously to Justin O’Shea; or to Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen, who studied to be architects; or Humberto Leon and Carol Kim of Opening Ceremony and now Kenzo, who started as retailers before they were co-creative directors. These “untrained” designers, unlike Tory Burch, create fashion, and not logoed lifestyle brands for people with french manicures. Secondly, Chung has had a string of collaborative design experiences, more than any other public figure, and is incredibly well-situated to take on her own line – she is much better positioned to design than Burch was when she launched Tory Burch on a dark day in 2004.

Grouping Chung and Burch together for being “untrained” is not only bizarre, but simultaneously incredibly out of touch with the direction in which fashion creation is moving: it’s not just the realm of trained designers anymore. It hasn’t been for a while. It will become even less so after the smashing success of the likes of Leon and Kim at Kenzo and O’Shea at Brioni, Kate Moss for Topshop, and even Victoria Beckham’s eponymous line. Truly exceptional fashion is about instinct, which thoughtful and innovative stylists, retailers, bloggers and brand managers have in abundance — perhaps more than some trained designers do.  Personal style and understanding of brand has become the new and most important qualifications for design, and for this Chung and O’Shea are insanely qualified. Elsa Schiaparelli and Miuccia Prada were not technically trained, and many designers today, including Raf Simons, do not sketch. Bloggers like Vanessa Hong and Elin King, whom I love, and Rumi Neely, whom I used to like as a teen but about whom I am now ambivalent, have all started fashion labels. Olivia Palermo, Erika Bearman, Lauren Santo Domingo, Miroslava Duma, and Maja Wyh should all be next. Some of these women, I’m sure, are afraid of the celebrity-label brushoff, and/or the Rachel Zoe hyped-line-that-isn’t-really-very-good effect; I think Chung’s foray into the arena will help dispel these fears and help further validate a “celebrity” line, when the celebrity in question is qualified.

If anyone, Alexa Chung should have been likened to Elsa Schiaparelli, who was a little offbeat, had many famous friends, and an innate knack for knowing what looked good. Untrained in the traditional sense, Schiaparelli went on to become one of the most iconic designers of the 20th century. This kind of path is one that makes sense for Chung, and should be aspirational to both trained and untrained creators of fashion alike – not a bulky, empty empire. If that’s not clear to the New York Times, I question their relevancy, and  their conception of success in the fashion world.