As the fashion calendar continues to realign, coalesce, and settle after a dramatic year of changes, the newly renamed London Fashion Week Men’s has turned to its bright young lights bursting with talent to carry the torch. This was especially evident at Fashion East’s menswear presentations, on the second day of shows.
First up: Rottingdean Bazaar, the project of James Buck and Luke Brook. Their project isn’t quite your boring old fashion brand (Rottingdean is a small suburb of Brighton). Instead, it’s focused on creative experimentation; clothes are merely the canvas for the pair’s wild ideas. At LFWM, they presented a rack of satiric care labels each individually boxed up, with usual instructions changed to read things like “fill in the stripes of a breton top with a permanent marker.” The duo also continued its love affair with socks, which were the centerpiece of last season’s shows. Buck and Brook presented some new t-shirts made out of fragments of ancient fabric the pair bought at auction.
Art School, another design duo, was at the other end of Fashion East’s spectrum: earnest rather than satiric, open rather than cryptic. Their presentation — created jointly with the Theo Adams Company — was a riot of sound and movement, and a tribute to non-binary identity. Like Charles Jeffrey’s MAN show the day before, Art School was pure escapism, full of heightened emotion, implicitly rather than explicitly political. It was bold and beautiful. The future’s in safe hands with the new generation.
Credits
Text Felix Petty