Israeli designer Hed Mayner continued to explore menswear classics with a desire to subvert their role as signifiers of social status. This season, his starting point was a large vintage tailor’s dummy that gave the clothes a lived-in look; in same cases they were literally designed to look like the former owner’s body still resided within.
The mannequin “became like a ghost in the studio. We called it Adam,” Mayner said at his presentation. He eschewed the runway format this season, given recent events in his homeland.
Rather than using the cutting and sewing techniques of traditional tailoring, he shaped his fabrics around blocks modeled on said dummy to sculpt their forms, creating rounded elbows and voluminous, stoop-like backs on tweed jackets and wool Raglan coats.
Clever pleats and folds made for a confusion of collar details, enhancing the pre-loved feel, and a coat with the look of pinstripe weave was actually made from a printed stretch fabric to ensure the lines followed the perfect shape. Shirts had rounded sleeves to fit neatly inside their outerwear cousins, and a special heat process was applied to chunky knits to fix their forms and give them weight and texture.
Pants were wide, tied at the waist and sported exaggerated pleats and deliberate sags at the knee. “The concept was more difficult to apply to pants,” the designer admitted. “It was mainly concentrated on the knee.”
By conceptualizing the familiar, Hed Mayner offered up a clever wardrobe proposition of imperfectly perfect — or perfectly imperfect — clothes.
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