Jean Paul Gaultier: Resort and Menswear 2013.

Previously: Jean Paul Gaultier Couture: Dandies, Decadence, and George Sand.

A Jean Paul Gaultier triple-bill! I probably should've posted these first, as an aperitif to the high-end extravagance of the Couture collection last week, but I got too excited and forgot about them.

The Menswear and Resort collections had far more in common with each other than with the Couture show, both taking inspiration from two of Gaultier's favourite design themes: sailor suits and Indian fashion.

The main thing that impressed me about this collection was that it was so recognisably Gaultier without actually including any of the things that I traditionally think of as Gaultier -- corsetry, drag, and structured eveningwear. Gaultier isn't a designer that I associate with relaxation so it's honestly a bit of a disconnect to realise that he can put out a resort collection that looks wearable, comfortable, and interesting. With most big-name designers, resort collections either turn out looking too extravagant and couture-like (ie, Alexander McQueen) or are little more than high-street clothes with a designer label.

Maybe this is a no-brainer, but I really feel like Gaultier knows how handsome works. A significant proportion of all menswear shows include at least one tux, but Gaultier's slight edge of femininity in the cinch-waisted trousers and short jacket makes his tux stand out from the crowd.

I'm not sure what to think of the turbans. In Western womenswear there's a certain tradition of headwraps and turbans dating back to old Hollywood, but it seems somehow more daring for a man to wear a turban for non-religious purposes? Obviously people wear what they wear for any number of reasons, but I'm pretty sure that Gaultier's inspiration for this collection was explicitly Sikh. Maybe I'm just overly touchy about these things but when clothes have some religious connotation it always makes me a little uncomfortable when they get repurposed as "fashion".

I think these are... kilt shorts? Which sound kinda terrible on paper but turn out to look awesome. Instead of the flat front of a kilt, they split into shorts with a pleated skirt at the back and sailor-buttons at the front, in keeping with Gaultier's perpetual love of sailor suits.

I LOVE EVERYTHING ABOUT THIS OUTFIT. Black utilikilt? Awesome shoes? Gradated stripes? I wish more guys felt comfortable wearing kilts and skirt-like outfits because this is SUCH a good look.

Of course, it wouldn't be Gaultier if there wasn't a little silliness thrown in as well. When an outfit is made up of nothing but stripes, it's practically inevitable that you're going to end up looking like a mime. Or in this case, a turban-wearing sexy sailor mime. I'm sure someone can make it work.  Eugene Hutz, maybe?

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Mugler: Menswear and Resort 2013.

This lookbook was strikingly photographed by the head designer himself, Nicola Formichetti, and the clothes were consistently beautiful in a way that still managed to fit in with Resort season's less extravagant mood. Just like how a good album ought to be played at maximum volume, these photos should be as big as possible so you can feast your eyeballs on all that agonisingly clean-cut precision.

There's just something so clean and perfect about this collection -- I love it. The Mugler look has always involved a lot of artificial fabrics and inorganic silhouettes but since Nicola Formichetti took over, the label has taken on a far less aggressive aesthetic and begun to concentrate more on tailoring.

Of course, Mugler tailoring isn't the kind of traditional work we see from the designers who are known for their suits and eveningwear. Formichetti focuses on structure, with this Resort collection looking more like airplane wings and aerodynamic speedboats than normal clothing, even though the pieces themselves (simple skirts and dresses) are technically far more conventional than the iconic spiked corsets of Mugler's heyday in the '90s.

The title of the collection was "Kabuki Kiss", which, OK, is not a good title. It's not like fashion shows ever have particularly inspired and/or comprehensible titles, but this time round it's almost as if they just picked "Kabuki" out at random from a bunch of well-known Japanese words. While the designs did show some Japanese influences, they certainly weren't Kabuki influences -- particularly since the most recogniseable visual of Kabuki is the makeup, and the model's face was hidden in almost every picture. Also, this is one of the least theatrical Mugler shows I've ever seen, what with the smooth silhouettes, the minimalist backdrops and the distinct lack of fetishwear influences.

I don't understand why all Formichetti/Mugler designs don't get bought up and/or plagiarised by sci-fi movie costume designers. (Sidenote: if the costumes in Ridley Scott's Blade Runner sequel aren't any good, then we can totally start a Kickstarter to sue him, right? That's a thing people can do?)

Mugler's Spring 2013 menswear line was a lot less dramatic than the Resort collection, although it did share its largely monochrome colour-scheme and pristine tailoring. The theme, supposedly, was the ocean, although even once I knew this I was hard pressed to see many underwater influences in a show that was mostly made up of razor-sharp, futuristic suits and lapel-free jackets.

There are unnumbered rules on how and when women can show their cleavage/arms/legs to the world, most of them counterintuitive, but for men the rules are relatively simple: do what you like, as long as it doesn't look "like a girl". So, many of the menswear designs that are brought low by the Zoolander Effect do so because they're exposing too much and/or the wrong area of manflesh. However, Mugler takes what I can only describe as the classy approach. For the last couple of seasons a lot of womenswear labels have been experimenting with designs that incorporate slits and windows into unexpected areas like mid-torso and around the ribs (which doesn't translate well to mainstream fashion because normal people have, you know, fat on their mid-torso and rib areas...) with varying results, and this is the menswear equivalent. Formichetti sidesteps any Zoolander issues by making the more revealing outfits as strict as possible in other areas: square shoulders, relatively conservative suit-tailoring, and all-black or all-white colour schemes.

This black outfit looks like it's made from diving suit material so I guess it could be construed as being ocean-themed?? Although to be honest all it really reminds me of is Spock's black Starfleet uniform in the Star Trek reboot movie, which only serves to tear a hole in my soul because then I remember that I have to wait an entire year until Star Trek 2.

Previously: Gareth Pugh and Thierry Mugler: Who needs trends when you're an intergalactic bug-queen?

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Resort 2013: Alexander McQueen, Mother of Pearl, Bibhu Mohapatra, and Roberto Cavalli.

Alexander McQueen
McQueen wins at everything again because as aways, they straight-up discarded your plebeian notions of "Resort clothing" and produced another Couture collection. Or, you know, what would be considered Couture by another designer. Because McQueen Couture usually involves a lot more antlers, brocade, and feathered crinolines.

pics from Style.com

Whatever this fabric is, it looks so much like galvanised steel that it's hard to imagine the model being able to move at all. Although the corset-belted waists were very McQueen, the chilly roboticism of the slim David Bowie suits were surprisingly distant from McQueen is usually known for.

If you don't like clothes with photorealistic insect motifs on them, then I don't like you.

These next two suits are what Tilda Swinton wears in the imaginary movie I'm writing about a Las Vegas talent-manager in the late 1970s who moonlights as a Kill Bill style bounty hunter. (All the "talent" she manages will be played by members of the cast of Teen Wolf.)

My favourite scene in this imaginary movie is probably the one where one of Tilda Swinton's business rivals drips some barbecue sauce on one of her shirt-cuffs, at which point she flips him out of his chair and hangs him out of the window until he apologises.

How, McQueen? How does it work? You take one of my least-favourite items of clothing ever -- the strapless onesie/jumpsuit -- and make it look classy. HOW?

I SWEAR THIS DRESS IS ONE OF THE COSTUMES FROM THE ASGARD SCENES IN THOR.

Mother of Pearl
My opinions of this collection are very mixed. On the one hand we get cool, comfy-looking street style outfits like this...

... but on the other, Mother of Pearl seemed inordinately fond of putting peplums and frills on places where they really should not be. If you're thinking of making a skirt that frills out anywhere lower than the waist? Don't. It looks awful. Especially if it's in a block colour and the rest of the outfit is really plain.

Bibhu Mohapatra
Sad truths: I'm obsessed with this kind of vaguely 1960s-inspired sc-fi minidress, but you so totally know that you wouldn't be able to sit down properly if you were wearing one. Or, like, do anything that isn't related to standing artfully next to something made of chrome in your spaceship-themed nightclub.

Roberto Cavalli
I am never not in favour of clothing that's printed with delicate blue willow porcelein patterns.

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Resort 2013: Versace, Louis Vuitton, and the undead return of Juicy Couture.

Francesco Scognamiglio

Today's topic is: funsies! Which is the kind of vocabulary that regularly comes to mind when I'm writing about Resort Season. Most of the collections in this post were dominated by silliness and bright colours, ie the main themes of Resort collections the world over -- at least, when they're not dominated by bland, saleably on-trend basics.

Marni
There's a lot of '70s-inspired designs floating around at the moment, much of them kinda fugly because, let's face it: The '70s. For example, there's certainly something to be said for the growing popularity of outfits that combine layers of skirts and/or mid-length trousers with an overskirt, but not when the fabric is rigid and coloured to match the furniture in Starsky & Hutch. Fashion borrows from itself continuously in a series of 25-year loops, as each old trend gradually transforms from "so old" to "charmingly vintage". The thing about "charmingly vintage", however, is that we get to retroactively edit out the non-hideous trends so only the good stuff survives. The whole point of recycling retro styles is that you get to weed out the stuff that looks like this:

Louis Vuitton
More '70s mid-length trousers, but this time they seem to be going for a Barbie Goes Backpacking kind of look.

Honestly though, this whole collection was a major disappointment for me, mainly because last season's Louis Vuitton looked like this:

Norma Kamali
This collection was inspired by the Olympics, which means that Norma Kamali is my auto-enemy. (Barely an exaggeration.) Seriously, the only good thing the Olympics have inspired so far is this Horrible Histories song. Bias aside, this collection wasn't too bad, successfully avoiding most of the traps of sports-inspired fashion. One thing I would criticise is that although I quite like the dress pictured below, it's a bad idea to use shiny fabrics in clothes that you're explicitly marketing as "affordable". I suspect that most of these clothes look kinda cheap in real life.

NO. This looks like an air stewardess costume from a 1960s-themed advert for those flights rich people hire to go into the upper atmosphere and experience zero-gravity. If your outfit unironically resembles tinfoil Space Fashion from a vintage TV series, Do Not Pass Go.

Skaist-Taylor
I was totes baffled by the hideousness of this photoshoot until I found out that Skaist-Taylor are the people behind Juicy Couture, at which point everything became clear. I mean, why not pair your party-girl frock with a fake fur stole that looks like it was made from furniture coverings, and then pose in front of a vomit/spilled-makeup combo background? Literally no one who buys these clothes is ever going to see the lookbook anyway.

You just know that anyone who buys this suit is going to wear it with that exact same styling. Women's suits are often modeled with no shirt or bra on underneath (because who wants to look at pictures of women where all their flesh is covered??) but then worn "normally" in real life, but I suspect that the Juicy Couture crowd will take this lookbook's advice to heart and pair their pink tuxedoes with silver platform shoes and a pout.

Ter et Bantine
I feel like I have whiplash from switching straight from Skaist-Taylor to the calm and stylish lines of Ter et Bantine. Snobbery-whiplash, that is. Chances are, these two types of outfit will be marketed at exactly the same economic bracket, except the women wearing Skaist-Taylor will be rich because they're reality TV stars while the women wearing Ter et Bantine will be interning at their father's publishing company. Women wearing Skaist-Taylor put their party photos on Facebook; women wearing Ter et Bantine have text-free Tumblr accounts where they reblog The Sartorialist and whimsical photos of coffee paraphernalia.

Thom Browne
Thom Browne is dedicated to designing clothes that look objectively ridiculous, particularly menswear. The deicsion to attempt a marketable Resort collection, therefore, was kind of baffling. While some outfits were entertainingly silly (see below for borderline Willy Wonka cosplay), most were disappointingly bland and adhered to the kind of preppy tameness that I'd expect from... well, anyone but Thom Browne. I mean, for a guy whose last menswear collection combined gimp masks, belly shirts and pastel-checked trouser suits, this show was distinctly unimpressive.

Versace
The faux-masculine slouching, bright colour scheme, Joan Jett hair and spike heels all added up to something that looked like a cross between a K-pop photoshoot and a makeup ad. This isn't something I'd expect from a label this famous but I can't deny that it's fun, even though the collection does seem to skew a lot younger than I'd expect from Versace.

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