How do the cool kids wear a suit? Do they even?
These questions seemed to be on Hed Mayner’s mind as he was prepping his fall show, rich in twisted sartorialwear and traditional menswear, which both highlighted and entirely reframed the male — and female — body.
Showing at the Palazzina Reale di Santa Maria Novella, a 1930s Brutalist marble building adjacent to Florence’s train station, as this season’s guest designer at Pitti Uomo, the Paris-based Mayner paraded a sharp collection in the vein of deconstructivism.
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Models snaked through a maze of benches arranged inside the red marble floored space decked in Roman stuccos and walnut wall coverings — its grandeur a stark contrast with Mayner’s creations.
The first few looks raised some eyebrows, for the full silver sequined pajama sets under a fluid duster coat and the female pleated ensembles layered under a houndstooth short cape didn’t quite set a clear direction. But they were perhaps Mayner’s way of setting the record straight on his ambition to defy any norm, and retool classicism via unexpected contrasts.
What followed was, in fact, equally disruptive but more readable, entirely familiar and totally new.
“A big part of my work is connected to the men’s world and also the classical elements coming from there, and in my process and work there are always these notions, but then they’re kind of stretched or blurred into something new,” Mayner told WWD in a preview ahead of show.
The arm line of topcoats, bomber jackets and collarless peacoats — almost always paired with baggy bottoms — were rounded, sometimes standing up and owning the body rather than vice versa. The nipped waists, oftentimes cinched by leather belts, emphasized the unusual silhouette. Meaty menswear-derivative heritage fabrics were plied into hourglass-y coats worn with base layer underpinnings and horse-riding boots, while V-shaped suits with power shoulders and carrot pants lent abnormal verticality to the figure.
In Mayner’s ongoing study of form and how it can reshape the body and define an attitude, as he put it, the collection also went in quite the opposite direction, welcoming the languid fluidity of scarf-necked silk shirts bearing tie motifs and bias-cut sweatshirts, paired with carpenter pants or pleated baggy jeans. Draped blouses were matched with hybrid pant-skirts, and raw-hemmed culottes in grey flannel were worn with oversized hand-knitted cardigans. Save for the cumbersome dresses made of four layers of pleated fabrics of different lengths, most of the lineup read as genderless.
Press notes distributed on every guest’s seat wrapped on a provocative open-ended question: “who has the freedom to look different, who tugs at the norm?”
For fall, Mayner tried his best reclaim his own.