Burberry's Sartorial New Gentility
The true test of a design champion, like their equivalent in sports, is the ability to consistently turn out hit collections, fashion statements that both set a stylistic agenda and sell large numbers of clothes. On that basis, there are few greater heavyweight champions in men's fashion today than Christopher Bailey, the chief creative officer of Burberry, whose latest senior Prorsum collection for the U.K. house, staged Saturday, Jan. 14, in Milan, was a tellingly clever and cool visual discourse on a new sort of gentile chic.
"I liked the idea of familiar clothes, but playing with the proportioned with a certain contradiction. We are all hankering after something that is more gentile and calm, and a little more polite too," explained Bailey post show.
The clothes themselves were all about re-inventing the past - celebrating British tailoring, just as Bailey subverted it; though not in any aggressive way. Take his choice of elegant gloves or brogues - all classically cut yet all covered in studs. The same pattern was repeated in the giant bank of lights positioned above the photographers pit in the custom-made, and heated, tent in the same palazzo on Corso Venezia, where Napoleon once wintered in Milan more than two centuries ago.
Best of all was Bailey's ability to contrast silhouettes and fabrics with a certain bravura. Take his elaborate Mod parkas, rather recognizable all-weather Limey style, but subverted and enhanced with Bailey's bold choice of dramatic horizontal stripe panels. Or his micro blouson in padded nylon, worn over the sheerest of lean suits.
And just when the designer began to verge too much toward the formulaic, Bailey wowed with a excellent set of Alpine apres-ski sweaters, whose erratic patterns and crafty twisting necklines made them that rare thing in menswear - truly original garments.
"In my head I was thinking of a city smog, that became foggy, and then rain, and finally at the end there was snow," said Bailey.
