Bryan Conway was researching the house’s history for an upcoming anniversary project when he discovered the tiger buckle belts that were apparently a roaring success back in the 1990s: “They were selling stupid amounts of these,” he said. So many, in fact, that the company took them out of production in order not to compromise its tailoring roots.
Conway is an alum of Burberry, a house that was for a long time shy about its signature check but which has recently re-embraced it with gusto. In this Tiger collection he decided to rehabilitate the belt by leaning into its pre-Ed Hardy cheesiness, using himself as the fall guy. Along with this lookbook Conway sent out a photograph of himself, aged 17, on holiday in Spain heaped in scarves and proudly sporting a fake snakeskin belt. “It’s almost been like therapy and the most personal collection I have ever made,” he said. “Everyone has versions of themself from the past they don’t especially want to highlight and then they also have the person they would like to be.”
That dialectic set up a collection that contrasted elegantly draped scarf dresses and rigorous tailoring, much of it womenswear, again blown up snakeskin and distorted tiger print worn in hyper masculine—and sometimes borderline cheesy—silhouettes. As well as the cast models, the lookbook also featured visiting Swedish tourists the Tiger team encountered while shooting in Palma de Mallorca, as part of Conway’s ongoing push to integrate an authentic Swedish sensibility via his outsider’s eye.
The all-leather look worn by one sun-loving tourist, plus a scarlet roaring tiger print shirt, and of course those risen-again belts in menswear, played a little incongruously against womenswear that was generally very soignée and precise, even when rendered in that distorted tiger print. That incongruity, though, is what made this collection more interesting to consider: sometimes a little adroitly sprinkled cheese can add a great deal of flavor.
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