Eels were once a staple dish for working-class
Londoners.
Now dandies everywhere will be queueing up to wear them after Dunhill’s
Paris men’s fashion week show Sunday went off the scales.
Mark Weston — who is known for his cleverly engineered clothes — lit up
the catwalk with the ingeniously chic way he used the skin of the sea’s most
slithery customer.
With British designers dominating the final day of the men’s show in the
French capital, Weston gave an unexpectedly sensual allure to the most
unlikely of luxury materials.
In a sleek collection of shimmering and silky blacks and reds inspired by
the 1980s New Romantic movement, and The Blitz nightclub in London in
particular, the designer gave a dashing new dynamism to the heritage English
label.
With the rock star sheen he gave it, there is nothing fishy about eel skin,
Weston told AFP afterwards.
“It is super-fine and delicate to work with and can be a bit papery to
start with. But Dunhill is a leather house so we have these capabilities to
experiment,” he said.
“We gave it a bit of a sheen and it takes colours so beautifully and
naturally,” he said of his suddenly fashionable fish pelts, which had critics
and fashion buyers reaching out to touch them.
Leather produced from eel skin?
“And it’s natural,” Weston added. “People eat eels all over the world so
it’s a natural byproduct. I love the fact that they are being repurposed like
this.”
Dunhill was the second major weekend show to channel the New Romantic
movement, with Dior paying tribute to the late Judy Blame — the one-time
Duran Duran stylist — in a collection of bravura aristocratic elegance on
Friday.
While the British veteran Paul Smith must be pleased to see fashion return
to the tailoring he has so long championed, the loudest cheer for a Brit was
for Paris newbie Craig Green, who at 33 is 40 years Smith’s junior.
Does Craig Green live up to his reputation?
Three times London menswear designer of the year, Green arrived trailing
quite a reputation, and the youthful avant-gardist made no compromises with an
out-there show based around intimacy and the “packaging of the body and of
people”.
Using a type of polythene and leather for future survival clothes that
could have come from Ridley Scott’s “Alien: Covenant”, for which he designed
the costumes, they are unlikely to trouble the high street.
Yet there was an undeniable poetry and thoughtfulness about the way he
transformed throwaway materials like the rubbery meshes used to wrap fruit.
And there was a reflective quality too about his closing looks that used
colourful blinds as a metaphor for peering out windows, even if the models
rather looked like they had been hit by kites.
While the debate rages over whether Green is the “true genius” of London
hype, Lanvin’s even younger star Bruno Sialelli is already clearly the “full
package”.
Corto Maltese-inspired menswear collection
His joyously romantic collection was based on Corto Maltese, the dashing
and erudite naval officer who was the hero of Hugo Pratt’s cult graphic novel
series.
Having already paid homage to Babar the Elephant in a previous collection
for the revived French house, 31-year-old Sialelli again plundered his
childhood comic books for his youthful nostalgic vibe, with jackets modelled
after Corto’s officer’s coat.
With the Hadid sisters Bella and Gigi also walking the co-ed show alongside
South Sudanese supermodel Adut Akech, there were plenty of echos too of the
glamorous women Corto romanced on his swashbuckling adventures around the
globe.(AFP)
Photos: Dunhill AW20/21, Catwalkpictures