How Lonsdale returned thanks to Jordanluca

Jordan Bowen from London and Luca Marchetto from Bolzano met a decade ago at the Joiners Arms, a legendary club that no longer exists. In 2018, they founded their fashion brand JordanLuca, initially focusing on menswear and then incorporating womenswear. Their brand identity can be described in their own words, «The masculinity we tell is our story, our relationship, our life. Certainly, the UK and Italy are in it. There is a contrast between the UK approach and the Italian approach. We bring these two pieces of cultural baggage together, with ideas that do not make sense on paper at first, because they are a clash rather than a fusion, and we work to give them a shape», they said in an interview.

For their FW23 collection, Jordan Bowen and Luca Marchetto decided to explore the concept of chaotic uncertainty starting from the theme of Armageddon, the Last Judgement. Hence the decision to structure a reflection on clothing that focuses on neutralizing the categories of masculine and feminine - «the clothes are the people», the brand's designers explain. The body and silhouettes are recomposed and taken apart again in a game: Jackets and coats stretch the figure forward, denim has bows at the back, and hoodies are turned upside down and printed with digital fairies. And then there are skirts, dresses in printed silk, fabrics with raw food pleats, and cowboy boots. Finally, the nostalgia effect is enhanced by the presentation of the collaboration with Lonsdale, with whom the brand shares the London vibe: the logo of the brand, which was born in London in the 1960s and specializes in boxing clothes, is reinterpreted in a capsule collection consisting of underwear, trouser joggers and archive pieces. In fact, since their beginnings in the 1960s, when the movement was not yet politicized, skinheads have always used the term Lonsdale, as their roots developed from the Mod movement, from which skinhead is directly derived. The Skinhead movement, which developed from the Mod movement, has retained many typical style features of that movement, such as certain items of Lonsdale clothing, including the famous Harrington.
The collaboration between JordanLuca and Lonsdale is thus reflective of gender itself, as the brand has become an object of fetishization in British subcultures and the queer community, being a beacon of the lad mentality that has re-appropriated the Y2K stereotype.«There's a similarity, a sort of representation of menswear in the style of Lonsdale. There are also interesting similarities between masculinity and the subversive nature of both ideas. There is a commonality. There is hyper-masculinity. As much as Lonsdale wants to move away from stereotypes, I think we also have to accept him for who he is. Make him sexy. We know he's fetishized and that's a funny thing. Even though we are at the extremes within the fashion spectrum, there is something authentic about this kind of man. And then to incorporate him into a women's collection was really fun», the two designers told Hypebeast. From its roots in the world of sportswear to its global reach - think of the notoriety achieved by boxers like Mike Tyson, Henry Cooper, Muhammad Ali, and Lennox Lewis - celebrities like Bella Hadid have recently rediscovered Lonsdale's aesthetic imagery. This collaboration is thus part of a larger discourse in which Y2K once again shows its narrative potential.