When fashion historians look back at the 2010s, there are arguably two designers who will emerge as menswear’s needle-shifters in chief. At Gucci from 2016, Alessandro Michele generated an aesthetic upgrade whose genderless, inclusive influence was felt way beyond the house. And then there was Virgil Abloh, who once said, “everything niche becomes pop culture that is valuable.” Nobody did more than Abloh to bring “streetwear” (a term he insisted was a marginalising one) into the heart of the luxury fashion industrial complex.
Abloh’s first intern was Samuel Ross, 31, whose A-Cold-Wall label is based in London. Ross says: “There’s been a monumental shift in relation to self-expression within menswear. The ideal of uniformity and uniform-esque characterisation that defined the 2010s seemed to peak between 2014-2017. What has come about since is a higher level of perception surrounding the signalling of taste, sensibility and storytelling.”
So, what’s next? “History doesn’t repeat itself,” wrote Mark Twain, “but it often rhymes.” Today’s parallels can be drawn to the aftermath of the quickly forgotten 1919 Spanish Flu pandemic that augured the dawn of the 1920s — a decade defined through a dichotomy of extreme wealth and extreme hardship, and a dramatic modernising liberalisation of dress codes both masculine and feminine.
That liberalisation reflected a shift in attitudes to gender roles, chiefly for women. Today’s societal shifts forward relate more broadly — to race, gender and sexuality. LA-based Rhuigi Villaseñor, who emigrated to the US from the Philippines as a child, is the founder of Rhude and was recently named creative director of Bally (his first collection for the Swiss house drops in September). Later this month he will bring Rhude’s fresh streetwear-spiked take on the iconography and symbolism of Americana back to Paris for the first time since 2019. He also last month launched a label named Rhu (aka Redefining Human Uniform) in partnership with Zara that “reflects the codes I’m already expressing in my own label but steps away from the idea of ‘exclusivity’ that goes hand-in-hand with ‘luxury’”.
For all the latest fasion News Click Here
