Dunhill
Mark Weston has been building the Dunhill silhouette for several seasons now — pure, luxurious and slightly irreverent, British flavored. For spring, this was channeled with sleek leather trenches, slightly oversize suits with barely a button and collarless T-shirts — in ivory leather. Bare skin under leather jackets — some wrapped around the body, kimono-style — added a further layer of sensuality to the collection. New to the accessories thrust was a slender, rigid briefcase from the house’s London workshops, worn vertically.
Weston is charged with updating the label — where is the future for a brand known for fancy cigarette lighters? Here, he got a jump start, teaming with Tokyobased digital artist Kenta Cobayashi.
“I love the fact that he’s a digital artist,” said Weston, backstage before the show.
He recalled the label had in the past used patterns from hand-painting and traditional craftwork while here, working with digital methods, things felt a bit subversive.
“I love this idea of kind of turning it a little on its head and having this world of distortion,” he added.
More important, it worked. Cobayashi applied his smudging technique to treasures from the advertising archives, in this case, a Sixties store front — the Jermyn Street boutique, to be precise — streaks of vintage browns, beige and yellows on the rigid show invitation. Blown up on a nylon fabric for a chic poncho, where the long letters of the logo were stretched into stripes, it was a fantastic mashup of the label’s vintage luxury car interiors vibe and a techno style. Set alongside the rich, leather silhouettes — the poncho also came in a pale blue leather — and mixed in with lighter fabrics, Weston made a convincing case for bringing the Dunhill man to the future.