Black is back in your spring wardrobe
For spring/summer 2021, menswear gets serious
Back in the early autumn of 2020, as the economic effects of the nationwide lockdowns began to take their grim toll on bricks-and-mortar fashion retailers, along with many others, men’s tailoring brand Thom Sweeney opened a new flagship store on London’s Old Burlington Street.
As co-founders Thom Whiddett and Luke Sweeney showed Esquire around the new space, they ruminated on a bittersweet feeling of déjà vu, having launched their brand in 2007, shortly before the last global financial crisis struck. At the time, despite consumer fortunes going through the floor, the pair remembered that many men doubled-down on suits, seeing fine tailoring as a semaphore for their seriousness, hard work and employability. That is to say: the slicker the suit, the safer the job.
It is now almost a century since the economist George W Taylor posited the Hemline Index, the theory that suggests the hemlines on women’s skirts and dresses rise and fall in line with the stock market. In good times: plenty of thigh on display; in bad times, barely an ankle to be glimpsed. Is there a menswear equivalent?
A cursory glance at the new collections from the major fashion houses suggests that if there is, it’s colour. Or the lack of it.
Typically, the spring/summer collections, arriving in shops and online now, are all about brightness, lightness and daring. This year, black is pervasive. And not just touches of black here and there, but full looks of menace and drama. In 2019, Louis Vuitton offered innocent clothes drenched in hazy, candy-coloured whimsy, with actual toys stitched into them. A year on and the look is grittier: black leather, 1980s suiting and twisted A Clockwork Orange prints.
Black pervades, too, at Wooyoungmi, Jil Sander and Dunhill. It’s Prada, though, that tackles most directly the effects on the psyche and society of our current predicament. In June, as brands conjured all manner of socially distanced platforms to present their collections, Prada unveiled The Show that Never Happened, a quintet of films during which viewers were treated to an almost exclusively monochromatic collection of clothing. Only the odd blink-and-you’ll-miss-it dash of dusty pink or camel punctuated the reversedout palette.
Not only were the colours absent, so too were the details. Last year’s Prada spring/summer collection was awash with pops of pastel, marshmallow hues, stripes, logos, bellows pockets, bolo ties, badges... it was maximum summer. The new collection discards all such exuberance in favour of a sombre uniform.
“This is a moment that requires some seriousness, a moment to think and to reflect on things,” explained Miuccia Prada, the brand’s co-creative director, in the notes accompanying The Show that Never Happened. “What do we do, what is fashion for, what are we here for? What can fashion contribute to a community?”
Her answer? “I think our job as fashion designers is to create clothes for people, that is the honesty of it.” No room for whimsy there.
○