The artsiest collections at the men’s Spring 2016 shows involved inspirations culled from Japanese traditional dress, photography, architectural landscapes, and religious iconography.
At Études, the collective headed by artist Aurélien Arbet and graphic designer Jérémie Egry, the collection’s theme riffed on David Weiss’ illustrated book of rain-drenched cityscapes from 1975, Up and Down Town. Silk-screen patchworks by Adrian Horni and Linus Bill made their way onto tunic-like tops and baggy trousers that were layered one over another, as did geometric gradients of grey appropriating urban camouflage as architectural landscapes.
Designer Yusuke Takahashi at Issey Miyake also took cues from photo books: Yoshinori Mizutani’s Tokyo Parrots and Colors, to be exact. Painterly parrots were rendered on sumptuous silk blazers and sport coats in cobalt blue, pastel yellow and chartreuse, while references to Luis Barragán’s buildings in Mexico City led to a series of outfits in equally bright hues of fuchsia and cyan.
Japanese themes were taken over the top at Thom Browne, whose perennially elaborate sets this time manifested as a teahouse surrounded by scarecrows in kimonos in a field. Models, four of whom were dressed as geishas in full kimonos and crowned by Stephen Jones’ sculptural head gear, showed off sharp suits of traditional pinstripe, houndstooth, herringbone and seersucker, topped by heavy embroidery of traditional Japanese motifs including fish, cranes, flowers and event Mount Fuji.
At Loewe, designer Jonathan Anderson decided to appropriate images from an early 18th-century screen from Japan that he had stumbled upon in an antique shop in Hong Kong onto clothes and bags. Beige linen trousers featured embroidered cartoonish motifs, say, while a pajama-looking ensemble with contrast piping on the pockets sported an all-over manga print in shades of red.
Meanwhile, playing with religious iconography were the Italian designers at Givenchy (Riccardo Tisci) and Dolce & Gabbana.
At Givenchy, Jesus was depicted in his thorn-crowned passion across T-shirts and — yes — skirts, as well as printed onto transparent sweatshirts. Tisci was riffing on “bad boys” and prison stripes, but applied a great couture finesse to the masculine tailoring and sportswear that was so refreshing to see amid the gender-bending, hyper-feminine collections at shows like Gucci, Valentino and Acne Studios.
At Dolce & Gabbana, the collection was a mash-up of a Chinese fantasia dreamed up in the heart of Catholic Sicily: motifs of peacocks, pagodas took pride of place alongside various iterations of the Madonna and baby Jesus. Suits were immaculately — no pun intended — constructed to resemble fine Italian silk scarves overlaid with Chinese prints, while the palette of russets and blue-greens of the Asian theme gave way to the gold, black and white of the Italian one.
Painterly effects were splashed over Yohji Yamamoto’s runway, as the Japanese designer played with brush-like prints and collaging, first with soft strokes, and toward the end, with hard slashes. “Like the caution signs in army places, the stripe is always strong because it means ‘dangerous,’” he told reporters.
Another Japanese designer Junya Watanabe, played with a lot of shapes, patterns and colors in a collection that was themed “Faraway,” but was really about his collaboration with Vlisco, the Dutch company that has been the major supplier of fabric to West and Central Africa since the mid-19th century. Excessive patchwork, paired with straw hats, made some of the models resemble scarecrows, but oddly enough, some of them, in more painterly ensembles, evoked a young Vincent van Gogh.
