The Top Five Collections of London Fashion Week Men’s: SS19

*header image sourced from The…ming*

Things are blooming in the cobblestones of London. With a new miscellany of design talent and tried-and-tested champs of the industry staying strong, Spring/Summer ’19 promises to be full of latter day Lost Boys and World War Z extras in all the best ways.

Edward Crutchley

A gender-neutral co-ed collection that was the intersection of conceptual and commercial. Edward Crutchley stuck to his own aesthetic crutches of intricate fabrications but paired it with low-affair silhouettes for his SS19 collection.

Collaborating with French artist Lucien Murat – known for painting grotesque, dented worlds onto traditional tapestries – Crutchley paints histrionic patterns with an air of Far Eastern influence. Floaty, sporty suits jogged down the runway, passing the baton onto sleeveless samurai vests, embroidered satin robes, and nylon parkers.

Some of the prints were produced in the oldest kimono printer in Kyoto – which I’m sure many a UAL student on a gap year has seen – to mix ink jet printing with hand painting. Making the kimono-shaped overcoats and camp collar shirts in a roasted palette (think burgundy, ochre, sienna) look radiant.

*Sourced from The Upcoming*

Something To Hate On

The art-music collective that doesn’t care if you hate it. Formed by the London-trio Raff Law, Daniel Mould, and Max Clarke, Something to Hate On (SHO) found their footing on Instagram. Their vague ‘gram – tiled hoodies and logo-tees – did everything it needed to fire up hype before purchase links were pasted and sold-out signs inserted.

For a brand whose name calls for hate, they sure reaped the heart reacts in.

For SS19, SHO dialled up their apparel as a celebration of London’s inner-city youth culture with literal splashes of colour in the form of black denim jackets and lofty hoodies decorated with dried paint effects. The only thing clean about the collection were the neat lines of the pieces, think simple jersey sweats and joggers. Converging into a poppin’ künstlerroman-esque comment on how youth broadcast their artistic identity online and the things we create for like notifications and follow requests.

Xander Zhou

Collapsing the future onto the present, Chinese designer Xander Zhou also decompresses and shrink-wraps it into a colourful, extra-terrestrial world.

In a future designed and purposed by Zhou, gender is jettisoned in favour of blush pink teddy tracksuits, acid-washed denim jackets (don’t worry, you won’t have flashbacks to bad 80s joy ride films starring Jennifer grey), and inflated prints on trench coats. The future is a trip.

Abandoning the metallics and domes of a Disney-branded vision of Tomorrowland, Zhou challenges notions of futurity with tactile hybridity and alien aesthetics. Pleated sleeve panels on shirts and cargo shorts paired with boxy-sleeves T-shirts may, indeed, sound alien to the typical guy, but to Zhou, the neon yellow wig-wearing men-of-tomorrow will be front of the queue to cop this spaced-out collection.

*Sourced from Aitor Rosás_WWD*

Charles Jeffrey Loverboy

The champion of all that is genderqueer, the Scottish-born designer Charles Jeffrey conceptualised the idea of ‘emergence’ for his brand Loverboy’s SS19 show.

An energetic navigation of androgyny, the collection emerges as a futuristic vision of gendered-presentation. Rebutting the ways in which we scan the body and ascribe gender onto it; disabusing assumptions of morphology and orientation as ‘defining’ gender and replacing it with something wildly carefree.

For the first time, Jeffrey introduces sportswear to his lines. Styling neon athletic wear with striped knee socks and clunky kicks. Loverboy – a brand steeped in queer history – saw ornamented tracksuits and skeleton-print knits parade down the runway. Plaid patchwork tailoring and grotesque, space-age trousers with a celestial swoosh, wooden shoes and 3D-printed caps. To Jeffrey, the future is one that rejects gender in a The Fifth Element-grade display that celebrates the flaws of the human body.

*Sourced from Vogue*

Daniel W Fletcher:

Ending the best of the 12^th season of LFWM is Daniel W Fletcher. The designer – whose previous collections have treated fashion as a form of political activism against austerity – uses SS19 to upend expectations of working class lads.

For his first runway (the designer usually digs presentations) Fletcher roped together a bleary palette of grey, brown, black, and white to subvert boyish, working class visual grammar. Skippy Smooth Peanut Butter-coloured suits with split-hem trousers and cords of white rope looped to the sides of blazers creased the rules of tailoring. The wearable looks were coupled with frayed threads and loose hems, ‘Danny’s Hardware’ pseudo-pop art T-shirts, and hardy leather trenches.

They all form the starter pack of a guy working a 60-hour week going out on a Friday night and not returning till 8am the following morning. Where’s he been? Who knows. Why is his suit dishevelled and he smells of Pabst beer and Camden kebabs? It’s a mystery. But if he’s wearing Fletcher, we know one thing, that he looks damn good doing it.

*Sourced from Vogue*

Words by Josh Milton- Fashion Contributor at Ragged CULT Magazine

* This is not sponsored or affiliated content to any of the designers nor entities mentioned. All opinions are my own. All images are property of images has been stated in the above. I am not responsible for the source of the photos beyond these entities*