Contemporary custom in LA and NY

When I set off to interview Jasmin Shokrian on assignment from my men.style.com editor, I was skeptical. Shokrian, a womenswear designer, was branching into menswear, and not with one size fits all accessories like scarves, ties, or jewelry, but with the ultimate one-size-fits-one item in a man’s wardrobe – a custom suit. She’s never made menswear in her life, I thought (as it turned out, falsely). What can she know? Sure she’s offering it through South Willard, one of Los Angeles’ most interesting men’s stores, where it has to compete with labels like APC, Raf Simons and Veronique Branquinho, but it still sounded like a very fashionable flash in the pan.

I met Shokrian in gleaming white floor-though apartment on Prince Street that she rents for showings during Fashion Week. Actually, first I met the suit, a slim notch lapel one button model in midnight blue featherweight woven cashmere. It was nowhere near my size, but I tried it on anyway. The canvas chest piece was beautifully light. It was the first suit she has made for her first and so far only client, painter Christopher Vasell (pictured).

When Shokrian appeared we talked about it. The evolution toward menswear seems easy for her. From art school, she moved first into fabric sculptures and then into simple, sculptural womenswear in menswear fabrics. Naturally men were asking her to make things for them, in particular shawls. She showed me pictures of them that looked good. Shawls are hard for men to get away with, but if you’re like JoJo at Atelier, you can, and the effect is smashing.

Shokrian recognizes that without a men’s tailoring background, it would be hard for her to make a good suit herself, so instead she found an LA based custom tailor that she named but kept off the record, since what she’s selling is her eye and stylistic intelligence, rather than his skill with a needle. The details that were distinctively hers were a cotton backed silk lining and silk-cotton voile pocketing, both of which felt very luxurious even if, in the latter case, a bit delicate. The suit itself was unlike the tailor’s usual efforts, she said. I don’t know the tailor, so all I could see was clean modernity – no dandyism here. The coat was not fashionably short – hooray! The lapel was slightly rounded with a downward sloping notch, a signature nowadays of Oxxford, which makes the best-tailored suit in the country but with mostly boxy, stodgy silhouettes. Hers is not. The pants are, or rather the client is, so slim that the thighs gather in with tiny pin tuck pleats on the otherwise flat front. They tapered neatly, with no cuff.

The model showing it also worked as a fit model for Marc Jacobs, in other words, skinny. Vassell had a fit model physique. I noted that one tailor’s New York Times ad showed his men measuring NBA players and sumo wrestlers. She didn’t think they would come up in her client list. Shokrian said her clients are more likely to have fit-model physiques because of their limited size range – problem solved!

The cost is $3-4,000, depending on the fabric, which for a USA made true custom suit with several fittings is not exorbitant, so I wish her luck.

The novelty here is a contemporary multibrand men’s store offering contemporary custom. In New York downtown, one can get custom or at least Made to Measure clothing at several single-brand stores like Duncan Quinn, Seize sur Vingt or Freemans, and other custom-oriented stores like SEW have some ready-to-wear as well, but otherwise one has to go uptown to the larger emporiums. The biggest reason to go downtown, or to hire Shokrian in LA, is to get a tailor or stylist who is young enough, in mind at least, to understand the attitude you want to project and make a suit to match it. I’m not thinking of flashy details but rather of the slim cut and lighter construction that younger men want. A tailor may tell you that he can do anything, but each has his sweet spot, and the sweet spot of today is shifting. The old guard, like designer Alan Flusser in this DNR article about the downtown tailoring scene may look upon the new scene with contempt (some borne of ignorance), but that won’t stop the change from happening.

"Modern Menswear" and New York City

Last week I interviewed Hywel Davies for an item on his book Modern Menswear, which has now appeared on men.style.com. The book profiles 36 established and early-career menswear designers that he found all over the world, although, in true fashion world reality, his book budget barely got him from his London base through the Chunnel to Paris.

I asked him about New York. As the menswear spotlight shifts bi-annually from Milan to Paris to us, what and where are we, in his eyes? I know that like many other primitive tribes, we consider our home as the navel of the world, but his book introduction suggested otherwise. “Milan and Paris are regarded as the key capitals in menswear fashion design….Milan promotes huge luxury brands that sell globally….Paris is a podium for innovation.” OK, and New York? “New York offers important support to designers with a commercial sensibility as their driving force….However it is Antwerp in Belgium and London that are paramount in informing the new contemporaries in menswear.”

Yes, I know we are market-minded, but isn’t it still a bit depressing? (This dispassionate reality-check can be seen, among other places in Suzy Menkes' review of Thom Browne, which she finished by noting, that it’s “difficult - especially in conventional New York - to be both a visionary and an exhibitionist”) Davies tried to mollify me by noting that in the two years since he began his research, New York is looking up. "People do look to America in terms of selling power, clothes that understand the market place…but it’s having a resurgence, of being cool….younger, edgier, creative….it’s challenging the designers that are in Paris which is great."

I’ll try to feel better. He himself should be feeling fine, as Paul Smith is throwing him a party today in his Floral Street London flagship store. For the book itself, pre-order here.

My Thom Browne coverage in the Sun

is online here:

The phrase ‘masculine bonnet’ was my editor’s contribution. A bonnet is a hat that ties under the chin, as these do certainly, but still.

The Browne show confronts me in several ways, first in the relation between the runway and the racks. The most wearable bits were the six pocket coats and the formal coats with piping, as I reported. Also important for Browne fans is widening of available fabrics to include stripes, argyles and plaids. The other stuff is mostly for show, as in many couture runway shows. The webbing and feathers, Siamese trousers, straitjacket ribbons and stiltwalkers move a lot of tight gray worsted suits, just as a Calvin Klein or Dior runway show moves a lot of perfume and underwear. It maintains the erotic power and general associations of the brand.

The erotic associations of Thom Browne are confounding because while they bind, constrict and hobble men, they do not feminize. This precise noplace has been tagged by many ringmasters before Browne: recall the menacing androgyny of the MC in Cabaret, or Malcolm McDowell in Clockwork Orange.

Browne’s circus imagery – the striped tent and welcome to the ‘craziest show on earth’ -- sends a mixed message. The circus ring is generally reserved for feats of skill and daring, like his stiltwalker, while the sideshow is for freaks of nature, like his Siamese twin-suit or his tied-up crazies. Browne’s skill is evident in the details of the tailoring, something unfortunately best seen from the back and not seen in most full frontal runway coverage (menswear usually lacks the detail shots that womenswear enjoys), but what he is daring to do mystifies me as it does many others like New York Magazine’s Amy Larocca. I don’t understand how it frees or liberates, and neither do I understand how it makes enslavement exciting.

On the other hand, bare ankles for fall and winter are out, and socks are in. Be glad for that.

Being there (Thom Browne)

Monday’s Thom Browne presentation was in the cavernous Exit Art Gallery on 36^th and 10^th. Standing outside the striped circus tent, and sipping champagne old-style flat glasses served by Browne-sweatered young men, I spotted one guy I remembered from the Oak Bond St party on Friday.(Oak is a Williamsburg idea now exported to Manhattan, and as a Williamsburger, I’m rooting for it.). The man was unmistakable because he had been wearing the Harmon mudcloth D/B coat (see below) and pants. As a suit, they pull one back to places I have never been, like just outside the frame of a Grace Jones cover shoot for one of her Dunbar/Shakespeare albums. Back in the present, I was asking the Harmon Mudcloth Suit Man, what is the point of being here? Isn’t it all online?

He was a stylist – no wonder he had looked so happy in that suit. Why were we here? He repeated, looking at the champagne (Henriot) and rolling his eyes. OK, beyond that? You can see how the clothing drapes, flows and moves. But video creep is unstoppable; now anyone can see not only stills of the looks but also their continuous motion. So what’s left? Details, which of course do count for a lot in a Thom Browne show – more on this later. But HD video will eliminate this advantage as well. So what is left is really theater, the sensation of rolling with or against the audience of which you are a part. But if you are a critic or a buyer, does this sharpen your appreciation, or dull it?

But then the curtains opened and we hurried to our seats. The Monday Browne crowd and the Sunday Y-3 crowd were wildly different. From Y-3’s day-after press release: “Guests included: Ellen Pompeo, Helena Christensen, Lupe Fiasco, Ioan Gruffuld, Vincent Gallo, The Misshapes, Damon Dash, Justin Theroux, Mark Gonzales, Stella Schnabel, Genevieve Jones, Tom Sachs, Terence Koh, Arden Wohl, Tallulah Harlech, Cho Kang Hee, Drena DeNiro, Aaron Young, Max Vadukul and Craig McDean.” Browne’s crowd was smaller and had a stronger mix of serious clothing people – Andre Leon Talley, Simon Doonan, Robert Bryan– with just a few boldface names like David Furnish, who sat in front of me. Flashbulbs were minimal. In his row were Stefano Tonch of the Times and Tim Blanks, who covers every show for men.style.com.

About the show itself, I’ll say nothing until my bit appears in the Sun tomorrow.

About being there, there are practical advantages. Although catalogue shoots now show clothing from several angles, very few runway videos show more than one. At Y-3, for instance, the photo bank was at one end of the long ice wall, so all images could be full frontal. The audience saw them in profile, revealing that the Y-3 man’s pant silhouette, baggy through the thigh and tapering sharply to the ankle, looks good on almost no one. Also since the wall was so long, and most of the models had shoulder bags, rucksacks, or wheeled luggage, they did look more like chic exporers pre-expedition in some first class Polar travel lounge. At Browne, many of his looks capitalized on male helplessness, and buttoned or tied behind the back. To achieve this, even the most yoga-flexible Browneian would require the services of a servant, or a Master. In the photos online, this cannot be seen.

My Y-3 coverage in the Sun

can be found here.

Being there (Y-3)

Last season, one of my editors asked me at the last minute to cover one of the Bryant Park shows. “Sure!” I said, eager for the chance. The show was the next day. Despite all my advanced pleading skills I failed to get an invitation….but wait! Aren’t all the shows online now, stills and video? Sure! I wrote my item. They loved it, but at the last minute my editor asked if I had been there. No, I confessed. This broke their rule, and the item never ran. (Since then, I’ve written for them many times, so honesty does pay, at least once.) But still: in this panoptic age what does one gain from being physically present at a show? Does all the theater and the distractions of being in a crowd of living beings who react or don’t react in unison a benefit or a cost? If you are there, is your appreciation more pure, or more polluted? In the art world, it’s a commonplace that no one goes to an opening to see art, but people really do go to shows to see the clothes, and just as in the golden age of 20^th century theater, the fashion critics come on opening night (the only night) and write their reviews immediately.

So how much of the ‘there’ do you get from being there? At Y-3, there was first the pleasure of going to Pier 40, on West St at Houston, and going first down a driveway that opened onto…a soccer field, with teams in play. This was not an effect, just a regular match. But this is an addidas brand, and a playfield hidden on a pier was very Y-3 architecture, so it sharpened the mood. Turning to the right and skirting the field, we were directed through the door or a long dark garage, with green pin lights on the left lit by small spots on the right, since the green landing strip was totally insufficient to get us 100 feet to the end of the dank room and the tables at the end.

Inside, on five banks of bleachers, we faced a wall of ice in foot thick bricks that were melting, but very slowly. To survive this, Y-3 issued each of us cheap fleecy blankets that molted and made everyone look like they just got off shift in the chicken factory, and chemical hand warming pads. Then we could sit and watch the ice melt, or watch as flashbulbs surrounded various celebs. Through a dark crowd, in the front row, there’s that golden face from The Diving Bell and the Butterfly. I haven’t spent enough time watching a man being photographed by so many at once. The bursts are so bright and fast that even the golden face looks like it is being executed. A final smile for the cameras?

Up by the ice, another photo subject smiles and bobs. Pose, smile, pose. Natalie Portman. She knows what she is supposed to do and she does it. As if jerked by an invisible string. In this moment, she only exists for still cameras. Watching her do it feels indecent. I still look.

Of course, there are some clothes later, but the Sun paid for this part so I’m giving it to them first.