Billowy bottoms, texture, utility pockets trend at New York Fashion Week: Men’s
Men’s trends at New York Fashion Week included textures, billowy pants, utility pockets and more.
Designers pumped up the volume, doubled-down on texture and added utility pockets to every conceivable garment surface in the collections they showed during the inaugural New York Fashion Week: Men’s last week.
The biggest trend in the menswear collections for spring and summer 2016 was a bumper crop of billowy bottoms ranging from deeply pleated, generously cuffed knee-length hemp/linen shorts at Michael Kors to comically oversized trousers at Duckie Brown, where 48-inch waistbands were cinched onto waists almost half that size and cuffs dragged on the floor. In between those two extremes came voluminous short pants of every length and width. The most memorable in the first category were Richard Chai’s roomy oversized plus fours; in the latter were Billy Reid’s patterned “baller shorts,” which were nearly as wide across as they were long. (SpongeBob SquarePants, take note.)
Another trend was the embrace of all things textured. In addition to run-of-the-textile-mill jacquards and cable knits — of which there was no shortage on the runway — labels went heavy on the quilting, micro-perforating and laser-cutting. One particularly novel treatment came from Robert Geller, who used a crumpled fabric paper called Tyvek (more commonly found in mailing envelopes and housing construction) to give baggy shorts and anoraks geometric-like crumples. Another came from L.A.-based brand CWST, which embroidered overtop wrinkled and puckered fabric to create an organic-looking design.
Even seersucker, the favored summer-weight tactile textile, moved outside the lines, rendered in alternating checkerboard puckers at CWST and wide awning stripes of color at Michael Kors.
And finally, there was one design detail that needs to be mentioned, if only so it can be prevented from getting any more traction: the proliferation of the utility pocket, which seems to have escaped the relative safety of its cargo pant quarantine and made its way, patch-like, to the front of khaki-colored jackets at Calvin Klein Collection, morphed into apron-like pouches at Greg Lauren and was plastered just about everywhere on John Elliott & Co.’s runway collection.
All these details, it should be noted, are in addition to the overarching athleisure trend, which appears to be turning into a serious multi-season marathon instead of a brief sprint. There were so many versions of the cashmere sweatpant and the micro-perforated suede leather varsity jacket on the runway that keeping count was an exercise in futility.
Rag & Bone, though, deserves honorable mention for presenting a parkour-inspired spring and summer 2016 that had models literally bouncing off the wall in a video that refreshingly emphasized the athletic side of the athletic-meets-leisure side of the equation.
