Spring and summer collections routinely mine warmer climes, including Southern California, for inspiration. But several of the menswear collections presented during the inaugural run of New York Fashion Week: Men’s, which ended on Thursday, dug a little deeper than the usual cliches, turning to places such as rugged Death Valley and sophisticated Bel-Air.
The designers of CWST (pronounced “quest”), a Los Angeles (LA)-based brand that used to be Riviera Club before a trademark dispute forced a name change, addressed the usual surf-and-sun style trope head on. “We wanted to head away from the beach,” said CWST’s Derek Buse, “and get away from the idea of the palm trees.”
Instead the collection headed in the other direction — geographically speaking — with designer Joe Sadler finding inspiration in the extremes of the Mojave Desert. Jackets and vests were wrinkled and embroidered in a way that resembled the crenulated surface of a cactus. T-shirts, tanks and button-front shirts were served up in a colour palette of mineral whites and dappled with patterns that could have been culled from the parched desert floor.
Michael Kors stayed closer to the coast, California and otherwise, presenting a laid-back collection for what he called “island life — from Manhattan to Capri to Catalina.” Kors presented a 27-piece menswear collection to about as many journalists and buyers, providing a running commentary along the way. “Summer knits are important no matter where you are because it gets cool at night so retailers remember it’s ‘Sweaters at night!’” he said by way of introducing a navy blue turtleneck sweater. “Think ‘nautical hippie’,” he said while introducing Baja-style chambray/linen pullovers paired with pajama-inspired linen pants.
One guiding principle for the collection, which Kors called “polished casual,” was whether it could play well with denim. “My family lives in Los Angeles,” he said. “And I think that if LA has taught the world one thing, [it is that] it’s to ask: ‘Can I wear it with jeans?’”
Perhaps the week’s most overt mash note to the Golden State came down the runway at Michael Bastian, where the designer had found inspiration in the likes of Hollywood power broker Lew Wasserman, Fred Hayman’s Giorgio Beverly Hills boutique and even the wallpaper of the Beverly Hills Hotel.
“Celebrities, the beach and Coachella, that’s what everyone thinks about when they think of Los Angeles,” Bastian explained in a post-show interview. “Then you see these people living in Bel-Air and Beverly Hills and they’re so chic and have so much style. I love that idea that in LA that you can’t really leave your door without expecting to be shot [by a photographer] ... you have to kind of dress up a little.”
The resulting collection was a dressier take on the West Coast look, in a colour palette of black beige, white, stone grey and olive green, the last of those hues manifest throughout the collection in a banana-leaf floral print inspired by the wallpaper in the Beverly Hills Hotel. (“We had to redesign it, obviously,” Bastian said. “We shrunk it, we overdyed it, turned it into a camouflage and then just ran with it. It’s on everything, including bags and shoes.”) Pops of accent colour included flamingo pink, icy yellow and pale mauve.
Key pieces included a stunner of a double-breasted suit in a navy and red windowpane check, a range of fun sweaters (including one with an intarsia knit banana leaf design and another with a Nordic-ski-sweater-like “Bel Air” pattern) and a pink, one-button shawl-collar tuxedo jacket. The show also included a capsule women’s collection (Bastian’s first), featuring a navel-baring cotton boucle, shoulder-button sweater and a banana-leaf camo print tank dress.
Bastian even threw in a handful of overt references to California — including the state motto (“Eureka”) on tank tops and sweatshirts and the state seal on custom-made brass buttons throughout the collection.
Why the LA-area inspiration now? “This may be [called] New York Fashion Week, but it’s really American Fashion Week,” Bastian said. “We’re kind of representing menswear designers from all over America, so it felt kind of nice to reach over to the West Coast. I’m a New Yorker and sometimes you can be a little more objective about an area that’s not your own.”
