There's still room for elegance in menswear

Looking at the FW22 collections, one wonders what directions are being taken in the field of menswear. Do clothes make the man? wonders Rosalind McKever when she introduces the critical text to the exhibition Fashioning Masculinities: The Art of Menswear, co-curated by Claire Wilcox and Rosalind McKever and staged by JA Projects. Contrary to what one might think, the male body and clothing still constitute the impregnable stronghold of narratives and traditions over which nerves have been overlapping for centuries. If, with Louis Vuitton's FW21 collection, Virgil Abloh had tried to question the motto clothes make the man - the vagabond, the salesman, the artist, the architect, and the gallery owner are just some of the archetypal figures that Abloh had incorporated into his tourist vs. purist juxtaposition - nowadays, the concept of elegance continues to be one of the many paths taken by various designers and brands.

At the same time, lockdown and the Y2K revival wave have smeared feeds and catwalks with a generous dose of sexiness not seen since Tom Ford at Gucci. Yet to think that it is possible to do without men's formal dress, as it is sedimented in everyone's collective consciousness, is reductive. Ties are alive and well, the black suit still makes its full voice heard, and formalwear appears to us to be profoundly renewed in its proposals. There is, in essence, a kind of recovery of that aesthetic imagery to which menswear has accustomed us that has not the slightest intention of distorting anything, but rather continues to investigate the functionality and potential of classic clothing. Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons are so obsessed with the many combinations of the classic that they have made a creative testament to it. «Many seemingly basic things are a conceptual choice: a coat, jeans, a dress. They look simple but are the result of a process, a choice: there are hundreds of coats, why is this the right one? It's a combination of a long process of design and decision, and then instinct. It's a matter of style» Miuccia Prada said after the presentation of the SS23 collection. She added Raf Simons: «The garments are classic, but their mix contradicts each other, making them exciting and new. There is leather against the body, then cotton on top: there is a kind of anti-logic in the combination of the clothes, an underlying strangeness».

Prada FW22

Dior Homme FW22

Fendi FW22

Valentino FW22

Rick Owens FW22

Something that had already been widely investigated during the presentation of Prada's FW22 collection in a harsh critique of casual wear, proposing clothes that «make people feel important». Amid volumes devoted to empowerment and, at the same time, an annulment of the male silhouette - see the focus on shoulders and waist - Prada rewrote its vision of the classic. A scenario partly shared by Dior Homme, which, with its FW22 collection, reiterated through a delicate scale of grays and soft hues are its quest for carefully contemporary formal wear. Not that Silvia Venturini at Fendi did not do the same thing: FW22 played with all the classics of menswear, even going so far as to sketch a stand-in for a dandy in full Fendi look at the end of the collection. Pier Paolo Piccioli even showed that masculine elegance also passes through a color strategy that includes, indeed praises, pink. Even moving away from designers and brands closer to formal wear, elegance claims its own little space, a reference, or, more concretely, a monochromatic or vaguely chic look. Even Rick Owens felt compelled to have his say on the concept of elegance, which, however shameless and dirty, showed an unexpectedly chic attitude in some looks. About the fact that low-waisted pants will accompany us for a while yet, there is no doubt. The same, however, could be said about the concept of elegance: it is still too early to draw a memento mori of it.