Through designing for menswear, I do like to keep a watchful eye on the latest menswear design and influences that reflect my own designs and styling.
Agi&Sam
Agape Mdumulla and Sam Cotton began the brand with the fundamental thought of designing for 'men'. After years of countless menswear collections displaying either a fear to create something different, or collections, which push too far and never seeing the light of day, they aim to sit firmly in the middle. With a strong emphasis on print and humour they believe that fashion should never be taken too seriously.
The designer's hold a very similar virtue to my own when it comes to designing. I always have an urge to create bold, 'unwearable' garments which test peoples ability to see their perception of menswear classically, and to create something which essentially is commercially viable.
Personally, I feel that menswear has come on leaps and bounds over the past few years. Men no longer wish to stick to a rule book of neutral tones, three of four basic garments and hold back on becoming in any way 'metrosexual'. Print will always be in fashion. The way Agi&Sam create their prints, drew me towards them as designers initially, I love fabrics to co-ordinate within an outfit, such as two-piece of three-piece garments, which they are very skilled at doing. I also need to challenge myself to create bolder user of the digital print facilities, the duo create lovely prints based upon the textures of existing fabrics, such as knit to create very contemporary designs.
Matthew Miller
Miller's design again holds great use of co-ordination in his pieces and beautiful use of digital print and photoshop manipulation. Like I previously explored in one of my earlier documents, my findings in a city hold the key background to a lot of my work, prints and colour ways. Miller's collection featured here uses prints that heavily address images he took from pavements, billboards, graffiti and other city dysfunction he found. Again, Miller's work pushed more boundaries of menswear, although his latest collections seem more commercial, by launching this collection (shown below) as his debut, Miller really set the bar high for creativity in menswear styling and outfit ranges, making him a great figure in the evolution of bold menswear ready to wear garments.
JW. Anderson
Through his origins in menswear, Anderson continues to explore the relationship between boy and girl and seamlessly creating a homogenous wardrobe between his two collections. He blurs the lines of gender in each of his collections, the label started in 2008 with a mens collection at the beginning of 2010.
Anderson's menswear collections seem to overlook his womenswear shows in terms of outcry in media publications. Yet very aware and grateful of these desputes, Anderson continues to gender bend his garments to an unexplored level. Take the question; 'if women can wear trousers, why can't men wear skirts' and putting it into a literal perspective is definitely his movitive, and I applause him all the more for it. For centuries men have worn what would now be called as 'dresses' in robes of 'skirts' as in kilts, yet we wouldn't batt an eyelid. Are we too caught up in what is considered normal, moral and sexually correct that we refuse to see anything else?
I remember seeing the beige jumpsuit on the cover of a popular tabloid the day after the show on London fashion week and new instantly it was JWA. I hope to be able to create a label and brand myself which holds that much poise and reflective character that it literally wouldn't need a label in its lining, yet you would just know...
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