Barcelona, 2015. When Jonathan Anderson won both male and female designer of the year at the British Fashion Awards last Autumn I was in Barcelona writing about Margot House, a hotel inspired by the Wes Anderson creation Margot Tanenbaum. (Herself something of a muse for young designers). The building looks onto the Spanish heritage brand Loewe where Jonathan Anderson has been creative director since 2013. The day after the announcement a buoyant Loewe employee steered me through its hushed and hallowed rooms, past the iconic luggage from its archive - the Amazona, the Flamenco - to the Anderson accessory that propelled the luxury store into the 21st century: the Puzzle bag. Anderson has hinted that when it comes to modernising an established brand you begin by erasing the familiar.  At Loewe he did this by changing the HQ, the logo and the coat hangers. The Barcelona outlet is part of the city’s famed ‘block of discord’, where Gaudi’s Casa Batlló is as stately as a gallion alongside the equally iconic Casa Lleó-Morera on the Passeig de Gràcia. The thoroughfare is the equivalent of a Madison Avenue or Avenue Montaigne and exactly where you’d expect to find a flagship store dedicated to the eponymous J.W. Anderson label that garnered these awards.  Instead the designer has opted for a 250 sq ft shop leased by the neighbouring Ace hotel on Shoreditch High Street in London’s east end. 

Tyler Brûlé, or someone that looks remarkably like him from the rear is holding a glass of something that looks remarkably like Rose´, and clutching something that looks remarkably like a Blackberry, close to the bar in the downstairs restaurant at the Grand Ferdinand. He’s listening to two of the guests at this evening’s function, where the group congregating at the entrance to the hotel, beneath the Lobmeyr chandeliers, have swelled and spilled into the bar area and the main restaurant. There, tables of white linen await, laid with Wiener Silbermanufaktur cutlery. This figure, who might be Tyler Brûlé, wears a navy blazer, jeans and loafers. If it is him there is likely to be a Rolex Oyster Perpetual Datejust clamped to the wrist beneath the cuff of that blue-and-white striped shirt. He has seldom been without it since buying the watch in Switzerland in 1983. The two men with him are talking to impress, convince or sell, and the man that might be Tyler Brûlé has the tilted posture of someone who only appears to be listening with avid interest. Beyond the restaurant a tiny clearing that, for the sake of this evening’s event will double as a dance floor. A drink or two in, and circular trays of canapés are flying above the throng like drones.

15 mins 3 secs read

_______________________________________________________________________________

For the Chinese male the journey from ‘yellow peril’ to menswear's jeunesse dorée  has been  a century in the making. Here was a demographic that no one had down as dedicated followers of fashion.  If Morrissey was right, back in the 1980s, about Bengalis in platforms then chances were the Chinese weren’t far behind. Or so we believed, those of us that never saw beyond the Triads and the takeaways. Now a wealthy, fashion-fed generation of Chinese men have become the leading consumers of high-end, cutting-edge menswear design. The timing is perfect: men are buying more designer brands than women; sales of menswear is growing at a faster pace than its counterpart. The ballpark figure for 2015 according to market research company Mintel is £14.1 billion.  And this, as the world is reeling from the events of the last decade in which China moved in on global fashion in the wake of its economic boom. The embrace of luxury goods by ‘the bling dynasty’ was a rebellion against the regulation Mao suit from the civil war onwards. Wasn’t it?

Long before the Chateau Marmont became Lana Del Rey’s muse and Sofia Coppola immortalised its faux gothic grandeur in Somewhere, there was Eve Babitz. The hotel on Sunset Boulevard is as central to the writings on her beloved Los Angeles as fires, earthquakes and the Santa Ana winds. I stumbled on her book Eve’s Hollywood the day before the 1994 earthquake. An Englishman abroad I looked beyond Hollywood to Heaven and begged to be buried in England as the city shook. A Babitz essay had a different take: ‘If God wants me to believe in him, I’ll do it, but only for the Pacific Ocean and sunsets. Earthquakes are only earthquakes. If God wants me to believe in him he’ll have to do better than that. I’ll wait under a door frame’. I waited under a door frame because ‘there is nothing to do but wait’. Outside, apartment blocks buckled and sidewalks crumbled. In the distance fortress Chateau Marmont, the first building in LA to be earthquake-proof, remained aloof. It’s foundations and secrets in tact. When the author A.M. Homes opted to write a book on the hotel in 2001, she made a beeline for Eve Babitz. ‘It was built for you know, peccadilloes’, Babitz informed her. 'If you want to commit suicide, if you want to commit adultery, go to the Chateau. It doesn’t mind brilliant talent, or romance, or lunacy’. It was from here that she witnessed Los Angeles ablaze during the Watts riots of the 1960s. It was here her former lover Jim Morrison jumped from a fourth floor window into the pool below. It was here a line-up of former lovers - Harrison Ford, Steve Martin among them - gathered for an auction to raise money for hospital bills weeks after Babitz herself was set ablaze.

There is something both sultry and impish about the fashion designer J.W. Anderson. He’s the hybrid of a young t-shirted Truman Capote and actor David Bennett as Oskar Matzerath, the boy who never grows up in The Tin Drum. With designs that blur the lines between male and female he seems perfect to comment on the limited scope of menswear.  He said in a recent interview:  ‘It’s bizarre the ways in which society reacts: they find it difficult to comprehend seeing parts of the body on a man’. It was even harder to comprehend in the post-punk summer of 1977 when, at 16, I enlisted for a bespoke tailoring course at the London College of Fashion. Anderson studied there decades later. It was the springboard for the ‘unisex’ look - shift dresses and bustiers for boys - that gave him his signature style. 

So much of what the likes of Anderson, the Korean designer Juun J, and most of all Thom Browne are designing in the 21st century is all I hoped menswear to be back then.  Instead it stalled in a siding, despite the sartorial sparkle of the early 1970s and what followed in that high season of so-called street style. In that summer of bin liners and bondage pants, high street fashion was becoming increasingly tribal - although this wasn’t entirely reflected in what was widely available in the shops. 

It was the historian Thomas Babbington Macaulay who coined the term ‘extravagant austerity’ when describing the asceticism of the puritans. Similar could be said of the minimalism being championed nowadays as an antidote to hoarding and consumption. Certainly when you look at the minimalists themselves. Some of whom - I’m sampling Macaulay again -  have a tone of mind  'often injured by striving after things too high for mortal reach’. For minimalists tend to be tech and web entrepreneurs. They’ve made their billions and cash has left a few of them feeling uncomfortable, even though their wealth is a perk of the goal they pursued rather than the goal itself.  Firstly, there are those whose lifestyles reflect the simplicity of their product. The late Steve Jobs cornered this one. The co-founder of Apple lived a sofa-free adult life and spent every day of it in the same Issey Miyake polo neck. Facebook’s Mark Zuckerberg, forever in the same style of t-shirt, embraces sartorial minimalism to liberate himself from unnecessary decisions.

The fictional literary genius and playwright Margot Tenenbaum is the reason I’m in Barcelona for the first time in twenty-three years. During my visit in 1992 I had the pallor and the smoking-habit of the Wes Anderson creation from The Royal Tenenbaums (2001), but not the mink and the missing fingertip. I spent that holiday with my Walkman headphones clamped to my ears listening to a demo from a band called Suede: ‘Won't someone give me a gun/Oh well it’s for my brother’. Days later, back home in England my brother died prematurely, while in his thirties. In hindsight that sequence of events and what followed had the hallmarks of the prologue from a Wes Anderson project. ‘The Royal Tenenbaums starts with a bomb going off. The rest of the story takes place in the wreckage’, says the critic Matt Zoller Seitz author of ‘The Wes Anderson Collection’. In Barcelona now, years after witnessing how death can disfigure a family as surely as a parental divorce fractured the Tenenbaums, I’m booked into a hotel that’s inspired by the couple's adopted daughter. In keeping with its subtle interiors and absence of signage, Margot House was launched with a whisper rather than a shout back in the spring.

6 mins 8 secs read

_______________________________________________________________________________

Two key moments came together at the J W Anderson spring/summer 2016 menswear collection in London this year. For me, at least. It began with the soundtrack, the one piece of vinyl that remains in my possession in middle age and recorded in 1977: the mesmeric spoken word album ‘Private Parts’ by the avant-garde American composer Robert Ashley. Here it was cut and pasted between the opening sighs from Madonna’s ‘Bedtime Story’ and beginning with the oh-so familiar line - to me, at least: ‘He took himself seriously’. It could be describing Anderson himself, or at least his attitude to fashion, or rather menswear, or rather everything that followed on the runway that provided key moment number two: cropped and cuffed trousers, chiselled court shoes with winged ankle straps in the glossy reds and silvers of enamel paint. The term menswear sells short this approach to design but no more so than the outmoded androgyny and unisex. Both have been bandied about to describe the current catwalk trend for blurring the line between male and female fashion.

One afternoon in the Autumn of 1979 a 17-year old Canadian science student stepped into the Fiorucci store on New York’s east 59th Street during a brief vacation. The experience encouraged Douglas Coupland to ditch physics and embrace art on his return to Montreal. Decades later - now an author, an artist - he reflected on that first time at Fiorucci: ‘(It) was like one beautiful little crystallization of everything you wanted adulthood to be. It was sexy, it was pop, it was fast, it was kind of electric.’ The artifact that had such an impact was the one thing he could afford: a postcard image of Twiggy with kohl eyes, pigtails, dressed in the leopard print once synonymous with Elsa Schiaparelli that Fiorucci made its own. The following year there was an earthquake in Italy. Not on the scale of the Messina Strait tragedy, but arumble south of Naples that registered 6.89 on the richter scale.

When he dressed in a crisp white suit and set about documenting the 1960s counter culture, Tom Wolfe was said to be using the suit as a mirror to reflect the status of others so that he himself remained a mystery. There has been but one sighting of the white suit in British politics - when it represented the independence of former TV newsreader Martin Bell, during his brief stint as an MP. While the catwalks of fashion week play host to Rick Owens boy frocks with peep-holes for an exposed penis, parliament remains the first and final resting place of the traditional - some might say bland and boring - suit. The choice of colour being one or two shades of grey, rather than fifty. Fashion and politics have always made for strange bedfellows, particularly when it comes to menswear - on both sides of the house. Whatever the achievements of John Major during his tenure at Downing Street, he is forever cast as the man in the grey suit.

Né à Londres il y a cinquante ans, Boy George a connu la gloire comme l'homme avant flamboyant de la Culture Club. Il a obtenu un succès en tant qu'artiste solo et un dj de club, d'être finalement reconnu comme un auteur-compositeur dans son propre droit avec l'acclamé par la critique Taboo scène musicale. Au cours des dernières années, une peine de prison et la toxicomanie lui ont apporté plus de titres de journaux que sa musique. Désormais libre, «propre» et sobre, il a réformé Culture Club pour un album et tournée pour trentième anniversaire du groupe.Culture Club réforment pour un album et une tournée. Pourquoi maintenant?
Comme je l'ai plus je l'ai accepté qu'il y ait une sorte de magie pour être dans un groupe. Autant que j'ai eu du succès en tant qu'artiste solo, il y a quelque chose de spécial à propos de Culture Club et ce qu'elle représente.