At Men’s Fashion Shows, A Mix of Aspiration and P

From left: John Kobal Foundation/Getty Images, Valerio Mezzanotti for The New York Times.Fred Astaire and a look from Rick Owens men’s fall 2012 collection.

The movies often keep fashion designers in duds, as we saw at Miuccia Prada’s fall men’s show in Milan and a few days later at Rick Owens in Paris. But these designers approach the imagery very differently.

Paris Men’s Fashion

Cathy Horyn reports on the runway shows.

Ms. Prada cast a bespoke formality over her suits and fur-collared coats, and to complete the total illusion of individuality (and royalty), she put some leading character actors in her show: Willem Dafoe, Gary Oldman, Tim Roth. But before her audience got to see those great mugs, she included models with mustaches and more bulk than the usual runway tadpoles. Afterward she told journalists that the show was a parody of male power.

Well, power is the magic word these days. It surprises me, though, that no one made a connection to British movies made in the late 1950s and ’60s and their gritty realism, and to actors like Alan Bates, Oliver Reed and Richard Harris, who in my mind’s eye are wearing a belted double-breasted coat with an ugly bit of fur on the lapels. Somehow I see “Georgy Girl” or a crowd scene in “This Sporting Life.” And I suspect that with a little research, the kind that fashion houses like to do to prepare a collection and dazzle us, I could find photographs of hoods, gypsies and con men who were rocking this look long before the Prada show.

Of course, men and women of all classes have long used clothing to project their idea of power and glamour. Today we have a fancy term for it: aspiration dressing. But that’s a reason to distrust this show. Although I sense a murderer lurking in Ms. Prada’s gentlemen’s clothes (to borrow Manny Farber’s comment about John Huston’s feckless villains), I am not at all sure that’s what she intends. She has left things murky, conveniently.

What’s interesting to me is that a young fashion customer might actually prefer the leaner visual drama of a gentleman who is at heart a murderer. I got that sense from the super-polished black leather in Raf Simons’s Jil Sander show. Obviously no old-school gentleman would wear head-to-toe leather, but that’s my point: What if there’s a new class of gentlemen out there? It’s up to designers to imagine how such a person might interpret things like impeccable tailoring and good taste. You don’t have to stay in the same Savile Row rut or, for that matter, in the costume shop at Pinewood Studios.

I was also intrigued by Rick Owens’s comment that he was inspired by Fred Astaire to make small-waist trousers with a bit of fullness in the hips and slim legs. When I was watching the show, I thought of Astaire, with his magical long legs — well, not so long in reality. A lot of designers over the years have been influenced by Astaire and other style icons, but usually their stuff is embarrassingly literal. Mr. Owens made sure his trousers, as well as his jackets and coats, would look sane on the streets.

He accomplishes a lot here. There’s a note of formality (without the dust) and that elongated silhouette that designers like at the moment. Above all, you can imagine a young man wearing those pants, with sneakers, and being stopped by strangers who want the look for themselves. That’s aspiration.