Vestes de jour : tendance ténébreuse

A central element to any Spring-Summer collection, daywear jackets come in all shapes and sizes. This season, you’d be hard pushed not to notice the garish color block trend.

There are two problems with this trend :

1) bright and flashy colours don’t suit all skin tones.
2) Powerful colours often mask poor tailoring and a lack of attention to detail.

At the other end of the spectrum, it is easy to fall prey to an overly « classical » style, resulting in premature ageing. This applies to brands such as Salvatore Ferragamo which, though the epitome of timeless chic, lack cruelly in originality.

How then are we to find a compromise between ostentatious and drab, shapeless and rigid?

This season, a handful of designers seem to have found the answer to our problems : the runways were overcome by the coolness of a summer shadow. The message seems clear : the summer will be sobre, if not sombre.

The play on chiaroscuro offered by a palette of pearl grey, charcoal and black lightens summer menswear with surprisingly ethereal results. Subtle and harmonious, these inky tones allow the quality of the tailoring to speak for itself, making for a more playful approach to volume and draping.

Sometimes all a jacket needs is one well-conceived idea. Such is case at Comme des Garçons, where a jacket ending in contrasting cut-out panels lends a sense of modernity to an otherwise traditional piece.

In quite a different register, this Dior Homme blazer owes its subtle elegance to a fine beige trim around the lapel.

To balance out the weightiness of monochrome, designers have focused on creating fluid shapes, favoring incredibly light fabrics. True to form, Croatian designer Damir Doma applies architectural rigor to soften the lines of this asymmetrical jacket.

For Kris Van Assche, it is simply a question of reworking the front panels of the jacket to give the impression of a seamless whole.

As mentioned when writing about Umit Benan, a double-breasted jacket can often seem rather square and ‘80’s retro’. At Wooyoungmi Solid Homme, however, the heaviness of the traditional shape is lightened by elbow-length sleeves.

Having already worked as creative director for Smalto and Ungaro, Franck Boclet is a master tailor who simplifies the double-breasted jacket by opting for a single row of buttons.

As far as two-tone numbers go, pearl grey-black associations are a regular feature this season. Black trims were pitted against a marble-grey at Miharayasuhiro, while Gaspard Yurkievich pushed the concept even further with a blazer alternating black and grey blocks.

The height of summer chic, the belted jacket has added considerable depth to the Spring Summer 2011 menswear collections. Haider Ackermann presented a loose-fit jacket with charcoal grey lapels drawn together by a tightly-tied belt.

At Yves Saint Laurent, Stefano Pilati used more rigid structuring, introducing grey-black layering to stunning visual effect.

Suffice to say that the only way for us to counter the stifling summer heat while remaining elegant is to create our own shadows, however metaphorical they may be.

Crédits photo 1 et 15 : Numéro / 2 : Another Man /
4 : Vogue Hommes International

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