I forgot it was mensweek.

Last weekend was the first weekend of my new year. I forgot it was men's week the world round- or at least on the northern hemisphere. I'm pretty slow at getting to the pictures.The quilted Lochcarron (?) striped jackets at Dries made me smile; the masks at Adam Kimmel distract my attention from the clothing.  Instead of focusing on the collections, I'm trying to catch up on my sleep. I recently rediscovered a favourite style blog: This Is Naive.

Teenage Iconography?

As a designer, I am much more fascinated by how proper adults live and dress than by youth culture.  Maybe this started years ago when I interned at the Costume Institute at the Metropolitan Museum of Art and did some research for their exhibit Blithe Spirit: The Windsor Set. My research mainly consisted of reading 3 decades of American, French and British Vogue*. Two things stood out in this reading:

1.  Vogue should have a comprehensive index that catalogs everything including advertisements, photographers, subjects, and everything conceivable.
2. The great beauties and fascinating figures were proper adults. They were not teenagers or young women, but actual grown ups. 
   

So, I spend an inordinate amount of time studying how men with strollers and mortgages shop for live with, and wear clothing.Despite my fascination with proper adulthood, alas no stroller or mortgage here, much of what I keep going back to for visual inspiration is related to my teen years or my romanticized idea of my teen years.

I don't think I'm the only one. Please watch the above video and note Jason Lee's cap. And then check out Mister Mort and J.Crew's caps. The teen style you grew up around is probably the first style you consciously reacted to and had the means to choose on your own. All else is to some degree or another memories and reactions to that. In the sea of east london slim trousers and fixies, those huge jeans are so exciting. And now designers my age are reaching positions with decision making power where these collective memories can be put to use.  For my own research I keep downloading varsity letters from A Reference Library's sharp eyes:

 

I'm not sure where these varsity letters will lead me. They aren't really appropriate inspiration for my current work. 

* Lee Miller referred to these publications as Vogue,  Frogue, and Brogue. Isn't that the funniest thing you've ever heard?

Whoa!

This exhibit called Ramp It Up: Skateboard Culture in Native America at The National Museum of the American Indian in NYC looks like the most fascinating ever.  If you go, can you let me know how it is and maybe buy me the catalogue. We are seriously thinking about booking flights to NYC in part to see friends and family, but also to go to this exhibit.

SS1011: Design by Harmonized Tariffs?

Les Douaniers

One reason, I think I'm a menswear designer rather than a womenswear designer is because the tighter the parameters, the more creative I am forced to be.  In menswear there is very little wiggle room and an interesting, attractive, feasible design must fit the rather stringent criteria. Sometimes, especially here in London,  I end up thinking of 'creative' womenswear as ghastly concoction of polka dotted ruffles onto more ruffles in a silhouette that can only be described as 'challenging'.  I work for a small company, so I don't get to hand off a tech pack to another department and then, as if by magic, 6 months later my designs are in the stores. Instead I'm involved in all steps of the process, so I move designs along from initial idea all the way to a piece of clothing that you pick up, buy and take home.  Today, I spent several hours working on calculating the entry duties for designs that will be exported into the USA.  So, for instance, men's water resistant cotton anoraks are charged at different duty rate than, say, quilted silk overalls with 45% down/55% quilting. I'm sure there was a West Wing episode about protectionism, but I was probably concentrating on the Toby's love life subplot. This stuff is complicated and I don't really understand at all why it works the way it does.   But these are the rules and they can explain why your coat costs 25% more (or less) elsewhere in the world without counting for recent currency wobbles.

Henry Morton Stanley

One reason I love knowing about this nitty gritty (knitty fact: cashmere sweaters have a significantly lower duty rate than wool sweaters, probably because there are no serious cashmere herds stateside. But one day! ) part of the process is because it throws a very interesting variable into the design equation. When I start looking at fabrics for SS201l,  there will be a certain amount of jiggling that will happen because of these harmonized tariffs. Synthetic fabrics will probably get waterproof finishes, and I'm going to try to pick linen blends for unstructured jackets that have just the right amount of rumpled, professorial "Dr. Livingstone, I presume" in part because these fabrics will have lower duties and will therefore reach the consumer with more value built into the price.  My copy of  Teri Agins's book The End of Fashion: How Marketing Changed the Clothing Business Forever is on the other side of the ocean. Doesn't she make this argument -- a certain fabric or suede was cheaper to import-- and a high street brand, Gap or Banana Republic maybe, so they made it look half way cute, it seemed good value, and it became stylish everywhere? I need to reread that book. You may unknowingly see that with SS2011.

Should you have a lot of spare time, and love incomprehensible government resources. Check out this one. I like Section XI, Chapters 61 and 62.

Inspiration: Raymond Chandler and Godard on Colour

I spend most of my free time reading for pleasure.  So, it isn't shocking to me that reading is usually at the root of my inspiration--be it the J.Peterman catalogues*, descriptions of Bruce Patman, coal miners wearing suits in Zola's Germinal.  Alas, the printed page doesn't make for the most visually beguiling research in a portfolio. More often, I am intrigued by how authors' descriptions of colours are what get my designing mind racing.  I'll take Steinbeck's first chapter of East of Eden over the complete collection of (both!) Steve McQueen(s!) images any day. Nabakov's Ada or Ardor is another key text in how I react to colour combinations.  If somebody else were to read these and design a collection, the colours that they would identify as parched California earth or black fur against cream would be different than mine. And maybe they wouldn't even identify these colours as the inspirational material in these writings**.  Let me get to my point: I'm 2 1/4 through a collection of three of Raymond Chandler's stories.  His style is so spare that at first I didn't notice many mentions of colour and clothing. I was shocked when I noticed Marlowe commented on a starlet's white blouse with a scarlet scarf around her neck contrasting with her dark braided hair and her pale centre part.  But now that I'm starting to read a bit more critically, colour and costume are all over the place:

A fat man in sky-blue pants was closing the door with that beautiful leisure that only fat men ever achieve. He wasn't alone, but I look at him first...[my elipses, not R.C.'s] Above the sky-blue gabardine slacks he wore a two-tone leisure jacket which would have been revolting on a zebra. The neck of his canary-yellow shirt was open wide, which it had to be if his neck was going to get out. He was hatless and his large head was decorated with a reasonable amount of pale salmon- coloured hair. His nose had been broken but was well set, and it hadn't been a collector's item in the first place.

 It is funny, because the words of those colours and fabrics: sky-blue gabardine, zebra, canary-yellow, pale salmon remind me of my memories of the film we watched 2 nights ago, Pierrot Le Fou, where those slightly bleached, but otherwise heavily saturated colours sorta burn into my retinas and frontal cortex.

But the Pierrot Le Fou colours have more sizzle or something. I imagine the Chandler colours filtered through a dusty, smoggy, sepia lens, where Godard's are only muted only because you are looking at them through an icy glass of pastis. I don't know if that makes sense to you. I guess that is why I've started this blog, to help me express what I'm thinking in terms of design. This year is both new and snowy, and my brain is starting to think about SS2011.  

*If you are reading this blog, you probably know me in real life and are thinking "why is Elizabeth writing in British English; she is American? I know she can be all affected and only eat raw milk cheeses, but this is a bit OTT."  My answer is this: America doesn't need another style blog; England does. Although I get much of my news from American websites, most of what I look at is on this funny island.

** At work, I realize how subjective the experience of colour is. I call a tweed "wheat;" the guy sitting next to me calls it "green."

Harvey Peekar, Richard Belzer; Compare, Contrast

 

I'm not being facetious or ironic; I adore both Harvey Peekar and Richard Belzer's style. I don't think either of them get enough credit for their awesomeness.

Pink is the Navy Blue of India

Welcome to my new blog about being a menswear designer. Here, I hope to show pictures and link to ideas that I find inspirational, and maybe, discuss them with you.  Notes on Harvey Pekar to follow soon!