Menswear à la française kick-started in Paris today, and it was all suitably Parisian. Carven’s lauded Guillaume Henry charmed with a lovably apathetic somewhat sterile spread of boyish clothing. The simplified shapes were ever more desolated by pragmatic block colouring and stripy bars of striking absences of colour bound across the body.
As simple as many designs may have first seemed when they met the eye, there was some serious contemplation given to construction and tailoring for the lean bean variety of men. There was also a faintly beatnik-boho air about all of the clothing, especially the monged-out turtle-necks, dainty acutely buttoned capped-sleeve shirts, spliced with the intense lucid brights of a few overcoats. Panelling then asserted more of its dominance over haute menswear, with Henry finding more and more parts of the male body to panel, in an overriding aesthetic that took all of its prompts from the no-nonsense handy-men of Paris’ roadways.
Utility often restrains menswear to some extent, and while menswear often needs to exhibit a little more pizzazz for the sake of one’s soul, the appeal of Carven’s SS15 and its suppressed swank sets up a tempting level of tension that keeps us going back for more.
by Liam Feltham
Images courtesy of Style.com