The first-ever New York Fashion Week: Men’s saw a wide range of grooming and hairstyles, from completely clean-shaven to full beards and long hair. The Art of Shaving has you covered with tips on how to achieve three top trends we saw this season. Take Notes!
New York born clothing label, Grungy Gentleman returned to the runway to present the Spring/Summer 2016 collection titled, “Defense Wins Championships.” Renowned piano player, ELEW, provided the head nodding soundtrack for the runway show. Grungy Gentleman is a New York-based men’s lifestyle brand that seamlessly combines design, digital media, and commerce with the services of a creative agency. The brand presented a line of bold, brilliant, and sharp fashions. The show also introduced the labels new logo and subtle recreations of their signature six stripe pattern in many silhouettes.
Boyswear – handled the first-ever New York Fashion Week: Men’s collection of shows with an oddly fun and spirited presentation from a retro time-warp, fueled by “The Sound of Music” soundtrack. Jackson McKeehan’s inaugural showing of Boyswear actually worked – or maybe it was just the humidity on a chic midsummer’s day.
CWST continued the male stronghold on fashion at New York Men’s Day with a spring collection inspired by muted colors and influenced by long textured shadows of the valley floor, rare chalk-like wildflower blooms, and barren salt basins.
Matiere S/S ’16 #NYFWM debut was focused on sophisticated fabrics and details that give a strong sense of modernism and streetwise spirit.
Matiere spring ’16 hosted a color palette of creamy off-white that created a build-up to true indigo, dusted with grey and city-black – reminiscent of the ocean. The collection was comprised of sleek surfaces and interesting textiles paired with technical nylons, cotton slub, and brushed cashmere.
The kingpin of apres surf wear strikes again – Thaddeus O’Neil, known for his relaxed, beach-bum chic collections, takes us on a journey to an isolated, tropical island and leaves us shipwrecked with his lost boys, his Children of the Night. Bloody noses, lips, and eyes don’t stop these boys from strutting down the runway with their passive and stoic bravado. Pineapple prints and loose knits belie the look in their eyes.
David Hart takes us back to our formative years, incorporating primarily primary colors, with a touch of green. Inspired by the Bauhaus movement, Hart‘s SS16 collection calls out the primary building blocks, of fashion and prints. Staying with his strong tailoring techniques he showcases structured linen suits with flat front trousers, pleated shorts, and geometric prints that allude to more tactile textures of the Bauhaus-era manufacturers. A front flap added to select pairs of shorts add the architectural element that imbues the inter-war era movement.
Moving beyond his debut collection which stayed within a safe range of navy, grey, and black, Carlos Garciavelez’s Spring/Summer 2016 collection plays with the spectrum of light, drawing inspiration from David Flavin’s 1996 fluorescent installation. Vertical gradients of neon blue into neon green printed on tees, horizontal gradients punctuating the hem of sweaters of lightweight bonded fabrics, and neon treads across coats and button-ups all convey the temporal quality of light that Carlos experiments with. “The challenge,” he says, is “to capture a finite quality of an incandescent source and how that relates to the human body”.