Luxury March 2022: the art of craftsmanship

A new exhibition at London's V&A highlights how male clothing has been a mechanism for both encouraging conformity and expressing individuality, Sarah Maisey discovers

“This will be a celebration of the masculine wardrobe, and everyone is invited to join in,” say Claire Wilcox and Rosalind McKever, co-curators of the Victoria & Albert Museum’s latest blockbuster exhibition, Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear.

Opening on March 19 and running until November, the show is entirely devoted to dissecting menswear, exploring its role in self-expression and highlighting how men today are dressing beyond the binary.
Despite the richness of the topic, this is the first show of its kind for the V&A. Even though it is home to one of the most substantial fashion collections in the world, the intricacies of male dress have been largely overlooked by the museum, in favour of its flashier female counterpart.

Promising to “unpick the seams” of preconceptions around men’s clothing – from its lavish past to the current decline of the suit – the exhibition is divided into three central galleries: Undressed, Overdressed and Redressed.

Undressed looks at how classical art views the male form, while Overdressed shows the splendour of menswear through colour and court dress. Redressed, meanwhile, looks at the suit, and how modern dress codes are undergoing something of a revolution. “Masculine fashion is enjoying a period of unprecedented creativity,” say Wilcox and McKever.

With the help of Marta Franceschini, Wilcox and McKever have gathered 100 looks from the museum’s archive, and assembled more than 100 priceless artworks by the likes of Auguste Rodin and Joshua Reynolds. Contemporary looks from Tom Ford, Gucci, Prada and A Cold Wall have been called in and scattered throughout the space, alongside stage costumes worn by Harry Styles, David Bowie and Marlene Dietrich, who have all blurred gender lines.

Fittingly sponsored by Gucci, the label that triggered a new era when it introduced pussy bow blouses into menswear collections in January 2015, the show opens with a deconstructed spring/summer 2021 suit by Craig Green. A hybrid creation that melds clothing, armour and metal framing, it is a far cry from dress-down Friday attire, instead exhorting the view that men’s fashion “has long been a powerful mechanism for encouraging conformity or expressing individuality”.

For Wilcox and McKiney, the choice of such a provocative piece to open the show is deliberate. “Rather than a linear or definitive history, this is a journey across time and gender. The exhibition will bring together historical and contemporary looks with art that reveals how masculinity has been performed,” they say.

The first gallery, Undressed, begins with the Greco-Roman ideal of man as athlete, clad only in folds of drapery. Plaster copies of the Farnese Hermes statue and the Apollo Belvedere show this classical portrayal of male beauty, pitched against the body-positive self portraiture of contemporary photographer Anthony Patrick Manieri.

A short dance film, called Spitfire, will also be on show. Created by Matthew Bourne, who was behind the 1995 all-male ballet rendition of Swan Lake, it is set in the world of men’s underwear advertising, while nearby, designs by Jean Paul Gaultier and A Cold Wall upend traditional dress codes. The tortured beauty of Auguste Rodin’s Age of Bronze, meanwhile, is shown next to a performance piece by the artist Cassils, where an ice-carved male torso is slowly melted by the artist’s own body heat.

The second gallery space, Overdressed, examines the ostentation of men’s clothing, both historically and today. Worn as a statement of prestige and power, men’s outfits were lavish in the extreme, and decked in lace and ribbons. A 1560 portrait of Prince Alessandro Farnese, by Sofonisba Anguissola, presents the prince in an ermine-lined vest of gold jacquard, and is shown next to a contemporary cape by Dolce & Gabbana, suggesting that decadent trappings as a telegrapher of status have never gone out of vogue.

Pink, a colour often anathema in men’s fashion, is highlighted in the work of designers Grace Wales Bonner, Harris Reed and even Randi Rahm, whose cloak for Billy Porter at the Golden Globes in 2019 is on display in all its cerise-lined glory.

This is placed alongside a 1774 portrait by Joshua Reynolds of Charles Coote (the first Earl of Bellamont), who is immortalised in a floor-length pink satin cape, ivory britches and a buttoned coat. Also on show is a colourful parade of looks by Kim Jones for Fendi, Alessandro Michele for Gucci and Bangladeshi-British designer Rahemur Rahman. The addition of Ahluwalia and Orange Culture, meanwhile, show how ideas of what constitutes masculinity have shifted over time.

The third and final gallery, Redressed, looks at the rise of the suit as unofficial uniform, from the rigid aesthetic of Beau Brummell to today’s runway. Providing another burst of rebellion is Nicholas Daley, the young British menswear designer who echoes the subversive subtext of kilts – deemed so anti-establishment the English banned them in 1746.

Vintage photography shows how the Mods, Teds and rude boys all turned to sharp tailored suits to forge counterculture identities, now displayed alongside mid-19th century frock coats from the archives. The impeccable cutting skills of Prada, Tom Ford, Raf Simons and Alexander McQueen are hailed as boundary pushing, while shifting attitudes are captured in images of Oscar Wilde, Cecil Beaton and The Beatles, as well as pictures by Claude Cahun, the French Surrealist photographer whose work challenged gender roles at a time when women still needed legal permission to wear trousers.

The 1981 series by artist Robert Longo, Men in the Cities, tracks the demise of the suit, while work by designers such as Rick Owens, JW Anderson and Comme des Garçons also helps to upend preconceptions of what, precisely, menswear is meant to be.

Balancing act

A charming collection of covetable objects

PHOTOGRAPHER | DANIEL ASATER FASHION DIRECTOR | SARAH MAISEY

The trend: Powerful monochrome

Burberry

Designer Riccardo Tisci embraced black and white for spring/summer 2022, with deconstructed jackets, dresses and skirts rendered in cow print.

Dolce & Gabbana

Reviving the heady fun of the 1990s, Dolce & Gabbana dished up this theatrically sleeved button-through jacket, cut like the wings of a butterfly.

Louis Vuitton

Nicolas Ghesquière folded historical references into his two-tone looks, mixing a puffer jacket with a vintage-inspired white blouse with a ruff collar.

Comme des Garçons

The label presented a fantastical bubble skirt, in black and white chevrons, matched with an intricately wrapped polka dot top.

The wearable canvas

Darshana Shilpi Rouget, founder of art platform Alba Amicorum, tells Sarah Maisey how her handmade scarves are helping to bring a community together

A silk scarf can mean different things to different people. For Darshana Shilpi Rouget, it meant a platform to connect with fellow artists and a new way to show the work of her late father, artist Babuji Rajendra Shilpi, to the world.

Shilpi Rouget discovered all of this almost by accident, when she relocated to London with her husband after two decades in New York, and found herself without an embedded artistic community for the first time.

“My parents were artists, so we grew up with artists that would come and visit – designers, musicians, dancers. So it is in my DNA, and I realised how much I missed it when I moved to London. Art is my life, it has always been that way, I can’t separate that from me. For the first time, I was removed from the creative environment. It was like being on an island.”

Shilpi Rouget also realised that leaving behind a career as art director for the likes of Tiffany and Cartier offered an opportunity to resurrect her own artistic ambitions, which had been sidelined along the way. “I wanted to reconnect with my fine art background and find a platform where I could work with all my creative friends and artists, to learn from them and collaborate.”

That platform is Alba Amicorum, which officially launched in October. Named for a long-forgotten 16th-century practice of inviting others to contribute to personal journals filled with poems and illustrations, it is a moniker built around the idea of sharing.

Alba Amicorum is open to artists of every imaginable discipline, but Shilpi Rouget needed one unifying product that everyone could contribute to. The solution, it transpires, was surprisingly simple. “I was thinking of a common ground for all the multidisciplinary artists and I thought of the scarf. It is a canvas of sorts, and the wearer continues with the creativity,” she says.

Worn next to the skin, scarves are both personal and a form of self expression. Endlessly adaptable, the versatile accessory can be worn either carelessly bunched under a jacket, artfully knotted at the neck or habitually hung over a shoulder, with each style revealing facets of the owner’s personality. For her project, by enlarging the size of the silk square to 136 centimetres, Shilpi Rouget created a blank slate to show off almost any artwork.

She began by selecting 12 designs by four artists. One was her own father, Rajendra Shilpi. Translating his paintings on to silken scarves offered a new way to connect with his work. “My father passed about five years ago; his work is no longer available to buy in India and a lot of my Indian clients bought his scarves and framed them, as they always wanted to own his work,” Shilpi Rouget explains.

Case in point, the Indian Carousel silk scarf is a fabric translation of a 1943 gouache original that depicts India prior to independence, in a horizontal narrative that echoes Buddhist and Jain paintings.

Despite being such a profoundly personal experience, part of the joy of being able to bring her father’s creations to a new audience was having his blessing to use his work in a way he had never imagined. “He died from dementia, but the nice thing is that I was able to ask him if I could use his work when he was still there, and he was very happy for me to do it.”

While Alba Amicorum was initially slated to launch in early 2020, the first attempt was felled by the arrival of Covid-19. “The timing was not so great. I literally had a launch party and moved into my new studio, and then the pandemic happened so I had to cancel everything. I signed a commercial lease, renovated [the space] and then, as I was about to open, I shut down for two years. So yes, it’s been hard,” she says.

Now finally up and running, Alba Amicorum has already released several collections, including four new designs that arose from a chance meeting at a dinner party. “The recent collaboration was with the Man Ray Trust,” Shilpi Rouget explains. “We have been working with his niece, Stephanie Browner, in New York. I met her at a dinner and a week later she called me saying: ‘I have been on your website and really love what you are doing, would you be interested in doing something with Man Ray’s work?’ I couldn’t believe it. He has been one of my favourite photographers, even as an art student. It has been absolutely amazing for me.”

From a delicate abstract pattern in shifting tones of grey to an image of painted faces in bold blues, reds and oranges, the four designs by the Dada and Surrealist photographer, painter and filmmaker Man Ray are, it turns out, beautifully suited to being featured on scarves.

With a stable of 11 artists creating designs for Alba Amicorum, the results are beautifully varied. One piece is covered in words, as if written on an old-fashioned typewriter, by the author and screenwriter Ross Klavan. Another is an abstract pattern of reflected light by James T Murray. Shagdarjavin Chimeddorj’s scarf, A Memory or Dursamj, is a scene of Mongolian horses rendered in evocative sweeping brush strokes, while one of Shilpi Rouget’s own pieces is a grid of warm and cool shades of red. Printed on silk, the individual blocks of colour seem to glow.

With such arresting imagery on the scarves, Shilpi Rouget wanted photography that would enhance this creativity, so she reached out to Juliet Burnett, principal dancer at the Royal Antwerp Ballet, and photographer Joel Benguigui to create images that acted as “an extension of art”. The results are elegant and evocative, and so beautiful that when Shilpi Rouget learnt that the pair was unable to work because of the pandemic, she began selling the prints, too, with all proceeds going to the duo. Generosity of spirit, it seems, is part of the Alba Amicorum motto.

“One of the most amazing things about doing this is working with these incredible people. And we are mutually supportive of each other. Whatever works to help each other out, that’s what we do.”

This sense of community extends to customers. “It is a personal relationship,” she explains. “They come over, we talk. I can also arrange for studio visits with other artists if they are interested.” Taking this time is crucial because, she says, “there is a story behind every single one of the scarves”.

And the storytelling is not just limited to the images. Produced in very small numbers, at most 60 pieces per design, but more usually only 20, each scarf is sold with a numbered certificate and is wrapped in zero-waste packaging.

“The box is embossed and is made from wheat husk that is normally discarded. The scarves come in a cotton pouch, so you can even carry it in your bag without it catching, and the tag is paper you can plant to grow wild flowers. Our shopping bags are made of canvas, like a blank canvas that starts its new journey,” she explains.

For the scarves themselves, only natural materials are used, such as silk, cashmere and modal, a cellulose made from beech wood pulp, which allows the team to tailor each image to the best material. “We choose the fabric depending on the artwork, because different things reproduce better on different surfaces,” Shilpi Rouget says.

To create the images, she relies on a small, family-run business in Lake Como, where each scarf is digitally printed. “They work for a lot of the big houses as well, and I am really grateful they are happy to take on a small atelier like mine. And they do such an incredible job, getting the colours 99 per cent accurate. It’s quite an amazing find for me.”

While the scarves are priced at between Dh1,970 and Dh4,340, putting them on a par with scarves from the major fashion houses, the tiny number produced means this is hardly a get-rich-quick scheme. Shilpi

Rouget laughs at the irony of her own husband being a financier. “The funny thing is most artists work for the passion. I was talking with my friends, and we were all so excited, discussing what we could do. I hung up and my husband asked: ‘Great, but did you discuss money?’ None of us had discussed money at all,” she tells me.

This is unsurprising, as Alba Amicorum is clearly an endeavour of the heart. “Nothing about this project is easy. So we might as well go all out. It is important to me because it really is about doing things consciously. Not just doing things season after season, but about collecting, about careful consideration about what you put out there.”

You might wonder what Rihanna and her partner A$AP Rocky have in common with the snowboarders executing big air tricks at the Winter Olympics, or ramblers hiking across the moors on a winter’s weekend.

It might seem like a stretch to think there is any connection, but the recent display of baggy, functional outerwear being sported by Olympians, hikers and the singer-come-fashion-mogul as she shows off her baby bump is huge. It is called gorpcore.

Gorpcore may currently be having a moment, but the term was coined in 2017. It refers to the convergence of outdoor labels and metropolitan folk. It is a streetwear trend with a utilitarian aesthetic that makes Patagonia fleeces and North Face jackets a style staple. And it is officially one of the hottest trends for 2022, with global fashion shopping platform Lyst confirming its status in its latest quarterly index.

Gorpcore really kicked off in the winter of 2020, when the great outdoors was the nearest many could get to a social life and when, despite the cold in some parts of the world, parks replaced restaurants as the places to meet friends. In truth, your best friend was a big down-filled coat to keep you warm.

The trend remained popular throughout the year, with an uptick in the latter part of 2021, as shoppers sought technical outerwear and footwear that could withstand the elements.
Some of the hottest products (and this is a look that encompasses men’s and womenswear) include Prada’s Re-Nylon puffer jacket; Arc’teryx’s Alpha SV jacket, a style from the Canadian mountaineering brand that the late Virgil Abloh wore when out snowboarding; and Moncler’s Cuvellier short down jacket. There’s a range of hoodies, padded slip-on shoes and those Miu Miu crochet balaclavas that were the only protection from the elements for the brave posse of skimpily dressed models who presented the collection on the snowy Alpine slopes.

It is practical and protective, and until now was not deemed fashionable. “The pandemic has fundamentally shifted consumers’ expectations; in uncertain times, movement and functionality have become key purchasing criteria for many fashion lovers,” says Camilla Clarkson, communications director of Lyst.

Celebrities and social media have fuelled that change. It may have been snowing in New York when Rihanna revealed her baby bump, but she was snugly swaddled in a long shimmering pink puffer coat. Two days earlier, the bump was well hidden beneath a windbreaker by British cult menswear designer Martine Rose.

The singer and A$AP Rocky have a wardrobe full of this type of functional outerwear, which has sparked searches online by fans. Similarly, singer Frank Ocean is often photographed in his orange puffer jacket by Mammut, the mountaineering brand from Switzerland that has expanded into clothing.
Model Bella Hadid has a wardrobe full of padded jackets, while singer Dua Lipa has been spotted in the coveted Yeezy Gap Round Jacket that was released at the end of 2021. The tie-up between the high-street brand and Kanye West was only available in three colours and sold out in minutes online.

Lipa teamed her cobalt blue jacket with cream tracksuit bottoms and Balenciaga sunglasses. It is that baggy silhouette with colourful prints that big air ski and snowboarding stars such as Eileen Gu and half-pipe boarder Chloe Kim wore in Beijing – bright, functional, super-cool and super-stylish. It was also a look favoured by the slick crowds at Copenhagen Fashion Week, with those in attendance wearing technical cargo pants, protective puffer jackets such as Louis Vuitton’s monogram rendition, woodsmen chequered lumberjackets and rubber boots.

So how did gorpcore become so fashionable? The term was first used by New York magazine’s The Cut when, in 2017, it was trying to find a simple, catch-all term for a style of clothing that had been around for a while and informally described as “camping chic”, but was really more than that. Gorp is an acronym often used by hikers and campers to mean “good old raisins and peanuts”, a classic trail mix and not the most eloquent of monikers for a fashion trend. Gorpcore is a style that’s focused on wearing utilitarian, functional, outdoors-inspired gear.

Brands known more to hikers and campers than those who attend fashion weeks have been crossing over into the mainstream, including the aforementioned Arc’teryx, North Face and Patagonia, as well as brands such as Snow Peak, Canada Goose and Columbia. The clothes tend to be colourful, as classic camping gear and outerwear is, and in hues that have not been so common in fashionable cold-weather attire.

But the industry has cottoned on, with brands including Canada Goose proving hugely successful with their collaborations. The label tapped Chinese designer Angel Chen in late 2020 to create a colourful capsule collection that combined traditional technical clothing with Eastern elements. It featured the brand’s parkas, convertible down jackets with a removable lower half, wind and rainwear, and knits.

This was a fashion-first for the label and at the time of its launch, Woody Blackford, executive vice president, product at Canada Goose, described the team as drawing inspiration “from distinct aesthetics that challenge us. Our brief is to reinterpret and reimagine our core design DNA through their eyes. Angel has done just that, putting her signature spin on our most iconic products.”

Arc’teryx, worn by rap stars such as A$AP Rocky, has launched a capsule collaboration with Jil Sander for mountain sports gear. Gucci and North Face have collaborated, with designer Alessandro Michele drawing on a selection of 1990s styles from the latter brand, including its Nuptse jacket and vest, reworking them with Gucci aesthetics.

The retro style of these down blousons, insulated bomber jackets and hiking boots were playfully enhanced using the monogram and colourful Gucci prints, some from the archive, including a mountain scene, a forest pattern and two floral designs. To this were added lightweight outerwear, sweatshirts, pants in techno cotton toile and vests in nylon Econyl (a material made from recycled fishing nets).

Small wonder that high-performance brands are one of Browns Fashion and MatchesFashion.com’s strongest categories. So why is this look trending now? Lyst believes it is because of our underlying mood as we move through and beyond the pandemic.

“As Covid becomes a regular part of life – along with fears of a recession, geopolitical uncertainty and the threat of climate change – we can understand why shoppers want to reflect an image of survival,” says Clarkson. “It’s clear that pieces described as ‘gorpcore’ or ‘technical’ have been resonating with consumers, a good indication that practicality is here to stay as the world embraces the new ‘normal’.”