Hed Mayner put his clothes on a pedestal. Not the slightly raised runway at his intimate show this morning, so intimate you could feel the clothes grace your knees as models came and went, but the wooden platforms he wrapped with leather belts around their feet. “It starts with this pedestal and from there it’s about the volume,” he said backstage.
Mayner is so consistent and with such a distinct point of view that you wouldn’t believe he designed against instinct this season by merely looking at this collection. His work is often about proportion, often with an extra wide, ever so slightly sloped shoulder and a hefty, grounding bottom. But this season it was about textiles: British plaids and luxe Italian wools, lightweight Oxfords and plush polyester herringbones.
Except that Mayner’s collection was still about proportion. “There is this idea of attacking the proportion, from an angle that is more related to textile and from that textile creating the shape,” he explained. The level of ingenuity with which Mayner approached his lineup was spellbinding, and that the result was so true to form only reinforced why his shows draw a tight but passionate crowd of passionate followers. Mayner is surprisingly introspective considering how many of his counterparts, often at larger, more prominent brands, are in conversation with his work.
He creased the herringbones to create a nonchalant silhouette, which he shaped slimmer than his usual tailoring. He cut papery cotton shirting to create ample and generous shirts, some slit down the back with yokes in the front and others with traditional or criss-crossed plackets, all of which he cinched with oversized shirt cuffs worn as a peplum-cum-cummerband. Mayner also bonded portions of these same shirts with stiffer fabrics to force them to hold shape in some places, most often around the chest. The result of this last experiment, together with the rubbery colorful prints he used to harden easy cotton T-shirts here and there (“color should serve a purpose, not just be decorative”) was, in his words, “statuesque.”
Such was the case also with a run of jackets in British and Italian suiting fabrics, which Mayner forced to cocoon around the body by removing their collars and lapels then filling that space by extending the neckline to crash against the neck. This caused the arms and shoulders to pull forward, an effect exaggerated by a top button placed high and the front bodices falling diagonally over each other. “Active repose,” is what the designer’s collection notes aptly called this idea. Think of it as Hed Mayner’s modern contrapposto.
