MENSWEAR SPRING SUMMER 2015
DAKS is breaking all the rules for Spring Summer 2015– above all, its own. Creative Director Filippo Scuffi has decided that the brand is mature enough to embark on a new creative and stylistic journey.
And so the new collection is inspired by DECONSTRUCTIVISM. Both the collection and the show revolve around the etymological core meaning of this word as well as the way of thinking it represents.
There’s a vaguely anarchic and seemingly irrational flavour to everything: from the choice of location, to the backdrop, to the actual course of the catwalk, to the colour and fabric combinations, right down to the casting, where models of various ages and body types have been used, representing the melting pot of cultures that has always marked London.
It’s an aesthetic imbalance, an ‘in praise of error’, that finds its own new and precise order as a result of its planning and organisation.
This is not a revolution that is an end in itself but one that looks to create new rules and a new contemporary aesthetic vision for a brand with historic roots.
This is a collection under the banner of cotton and silk which, together with leather and hints of satinized plastic fibres, displays a modern miscellany of fabrics that until recently seemed most unlikely.
The absence of the House Check – lavishly honoured in previous collections – is no accident but rather a definite choice, showing that DAKS knows how to look beyond; above all, beyond itself.
There are still references to the classic style, but with its own twist. The double-breasted jackets that have always represented the classic English look are certainly there, but some of them close on one side with a buckle formed by a double D, to represent the new element of brand styling.
More than ever it is knitwear that provides the exact reflection of the mood for this season. And it is on this knitwear that we find the graphic hyperbole that takes us right back to the theme of the collection, with signs and colours from deconstructivist paintings themselves.
To sum up: DAKS believe that breaking the rules is a luxury available only to those who truly understand them.