New York Fashion Week offers little by way of men’s fashion — the spotlight shines brightest on women’s wear here in America’s fashion capital. Still, the men’s roster was particularly emaciated this season, which wrapped on Tuesday night with Thom Browne. To twist an “Annie Hall” quip: The men’s clothes were forgettable. … Yeah, and such small portions, too.
Just one designer, Todd Snyder, a J. Crew alum who has staked his claim as America’s last line of defense against the roaring tide of casualization, showed a collection designed entirely for men.
His show, inspired by memories of the Saint-Germain-des-Prés neighborhood of Paris in the 1980s, found Mr. Snyder well in his element, offering a classics-with-a-twist buffet.
You want a herringbone tweed suit? Mr. Snyder’s got it. A raglan-sleeve overcoat? How about a handful? Corduroy suits with pleats? Say less.
There was nothing wrong with his collection (save, maybe, the onslaught of schoolboy shorts, which on a shivering February day felt like a misfire), but there was also little in it that raised the heart rate.
Mr. Snyder is a realist. He dresses many men who would break out in hives if you sat them down to watch a runway show. They just want some clean-cut pants. He gives that to them. Still, there were a few, though not enough, swerves in this collection. A striped fuzzy sweater that called to mind Johnny Rotten, and a risqué band-collar black shirt with translucent sleeves had Mr. Snyder wandering away from that safe harbor of “Would Paul Newman have worn this?”
Mr. Snyder has established himself as the kindly guide to the unschooled male shoppers of America. He should trust himself to nudge them a little further.
At Calvin Klein Collection, it was pretty evident what direction things were heading: the 1990s. The men’s ensembles sprinkled into Veronica Leoni’s debut for the label were a capable, if cold, box-ticking of Clinton-era fashions: the graphite gray suiting; the saggy, diluted bluejeans and subdued flannel shirts; and, most of all, square-toe shoes.
These to-the-point designs nodded to Calvin Klein’s pre-Y2K glory. (Mr. Klein himself, who departed from the brand in 2002, was in attendance in a routine black suit.) But I also perceived a lot of ’90s Prada, when its men’s designer, Neil Barrett, was offering his winks on prosaic corporate codes.
Calvin could have used more winks. As far as debuts go, this was more dutiful than good — an indication that Ms. Leoni had done her homework. The question remains: What man is this for? If you want an unobtrusive, cubicle-rooted suit or a workaday dress shirt, you can find one from Theory or Vince or even Uniqlo — at, from what I’m told, a price far lower than what the new Calvin Klein is sailing in at, making this reboot an uneasy market proposition.
The Jamaican designer Edwin Thompson did not stage a runway show for his Theophilio label this season, so I sifted through his collection online. (Mr. Thompson won the CFDA award for emerging designer of the year in 2021, but has been candid about the peaks and valleys of keeping the company afloat.)
Viewing it on the screen made me rue that I had not seen the clothes up close, especially some very Sly-and-the-Family-Stone flared trousers. All the more so because the Theophilio collection hit the internet the same day that Kendrick Lamar wore his divisive boot-cut jeans during the Super Bowl halftime show. The flare-aissance is picking up steam.
The true surprise of this week came when I received an email from Safa Taghizadeh, the designer of Cobra S.C in Los Angeles. Cobra was a label I used to see regularly around this time of year, but its last Instagram post was from nearly a year ago, and I thought it had stalled out entirely.
In a teeny hotel room at the Bowery Hotel, Mr. Taghizadeh explained that the Covid-19 pandemic had hit him hard. Then he split from his partner, Christopher Reynolds, the C in SC. Mr. Taghizadeh kept the label churning, largely as a custom clothier for celebrities. (As I was leaving, Jennifer Lawrence’s husband, the art gallerist Cooke Maroney, was on his way in.)
Mr. Taghizadeh was making a run at wholesaling the label again. I could see buyers biting. On steel racks wedged at the foot of the bed were generous ribbed knits, bomber jackets in tailoring wools and boxy double-breasted suits in basil green and sepia, making clear how Mr. Taghizadeh had managed to stay afloat by making red carpet attire for actors like Joel Kinnaman and Gavin Leatherwood.
There was nothing groundbreaking, but it was enough to reassert Cobra as a label to underline.
The strongest men’s ideas of the week came from Eckhaus Lattawith just-so straight-leg jeans and crafty-but-classy knits, including a particularly stellar black ribbed cardigan with a cornflower blue hem. Also on display was the label’s familiar funky palate of mustards and shiitake browns.
But what made this collection so potent was its leather jackets and shoes, produced in partnership with Ecco Kollective, an avant offshoot of the Danish shoe brand. It resulted in oil-slick zip hoodies with scrunchy hems and muscle man sleeves — a very ’80s silhouette that called to mind Claude Montana. The buttery jackets hung jauntily on the models, as if made from jersey, not hide.
These leathers were lux. So lux that they deserve perhaps the highest praise you can lob to an American brand: They belonged at Paris Fashion Week, not New York.
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