Embrace the Becks Effect
As London Fashion Week Men’s showed, there’s been a change in attitude to clothes. Stephen Doig reports
Asunny Sunday in Covent Garden, and away from the tourist hubbub of the piazza, a group of men are having a drink and griping about the bleedin’ London traffic. Nothing revolutionary there; it’s regular dad chat. Except this group includes David Beckham, footballer turned brand mogul and “Presidential Ambassador” to the British Fashion Council, a couple of Nineties rockers (John Squire and Mani from the Stone Roses) and a group of men’s style industry insiders, here for the bi-annual menswear showcase London Fashion Week Men’s and attending Beckham’s Kent & Curwen show. And how they are dressed – as a group of British guys in their 40s and 50s – is indicative of a shift in how men in this country are engaging with clothes.
Of course, it helps if you look like Mr Beckham, who has – annoyingly – followed the George Clooney model of ageing like a fine whisky, and it also helps if you’re one of the professionals who work in this £15billion UK menswear industry, but in their blazers worn with pristine T-shirts, trainers with suit trousers, blouson jackets in lieu of suit tailoring, they are a helpful litmus test. And it’s lucrative: the men’s fashion industry is rising at a rate faster than women’s, and is expected to grow by 11 per cent in the next four years.
“Menswear is reasserting itself with a new sense of belonging,” says Bill Prince, GQ magazine’s deputy editor and men’s style expert for Telegraph Luxury.
“You can see this in the use of outlier garments as everyday apparel – the return of the boiler suit (yes, really) or adoption of workwear as an alternative to the suit, and the countervailing argument that streetwear is sportswear and sportswear is streetwear,” he says, pointing to the verve towards attire you’d normally relegate to the gym taking prime position in wardrobes, and utility garments as alternatives for tailoring. It speaks volumes that the new British head of Dior Homme, Kim Jones, is a man who favours a tracksuit over a pinstripe. “For now, the suit has a fight on its hands,” says Prince, “but as we’ve seen over and over again, it’s made of sterner stuff than most imagine…”
As the myriad “ugly trainers”, zip-up hoodies, cargo trousers and mesh vests on the catwalks last weekend attest, the seismic shift in men’s fashion in the last 10 years has been a relaxing of the rules in favour of that tricky umbrella term of “athleisurewear”. The City boy who would have been trussed up in his three-piece suit, Oxford shirt, cufflinks, tie, tie pin, pocket square, polished brogues and collar stays has had his shoulders massaged and the stuffing taken out of his get-up. I forget the last time I saw a tie on the catwalk.
At Kent & Curwen, designed by Daniel Kearns, a collaboration with the Stone Roses resulted in a “school’s out for summer” aesthetic of skewiff blazers, club stripes applied to T-shirts and tracksuits with sleek trousers. At E.tautz, run by Patrick Grant (himself a masterclass in how to look polished but never posed), soft-fit suit jackets came with breezy trousers and T-shirts and gauzy sweaters. And at Oliver Spencer, trousers came fluid as melted butter, topped off with workwear-inspired blazers (no peak shoulders or rigid cutting here) or neat polos; a fresher take on a collared top in balmy climes.
Looking at show-goers last weekend, from the sublime (model Richard Biedul in a slouchy New & Lingwood suit and pyjama top) to the
Zoolander-sequel ridiculous (that would be the fellow wearing two hats; spare a thought for those sitting behind him), it was striking just how out of place the full tailored ensemble looks; uncomfortable, outdated and affected. But what should replace it?
“How to address the new way that men are dressing is a big conversation right now,” says Spencer. “It’s what’s on the mind of most menswear designers and buyers. I think that we’ve had so much sportswear, we’ll start to see a new iteration of suiting that’s softer and more malleable, taking some of the ease of casualwear but elevating it.
“I also think we’ll redefine what a ‘suit’ means; perhaps a bomber jacket and matching trousers with a shirt, instead of a blazer,” says the designer.
It might be the Becks effect – looking back, it’s surprising that it took so long for him to back a fashion label given his influence on how British men dress – but the increased visibility of men’s style has meant that the average man from Paddington to Pwllheli is more adventurous in how he dresses, too. I don’t mean the chap with two fedoras (what happens when someone comes along in three?), but a greater appreciation of colour, pattern and interesting silhouettes – call it the Queer Eye effect, where a jaunty shirt is the remedy to all style-woes.
“I think, broadly speaking, men are wearing clothes that are much more eye-catching than they have been in the past. There are more slogans, more print, and I think that’s perhaps because we’re more vocal these days, and less afraid to try things out,” says Grant. A collarless shirt, a blazer with a tracksuit top instead of a shirt, a pair of trainers with formal trousers… all of them are speaking volumes about how you’re riding the crest of this new sartorial wave with aplomb.