“Lightness, color, desire—and a lot of work.” That was the recipe for the new Lanvin collection, according to Alber Elbaz. The show itself opened with leanly dark ensembles (one jacket sleeveless, another fly-fronted), which immediately felt like a refutation of everything the house’s menswear has come to stand for. The sensation was fleeting, though: Maybe those first outfits were intended as some kind of conceptual break, but once the show took flight in a fast-paced frenzy, the details that flew out of the blur were very much in keeping with the almost-feminine flourishes that have distinguished the label: a tiny bow on a neckline, another at the waist, kimono-cut shirts, high-waisted khakis, a green coat in what looked like crepe, puff sleeves, shorts in tie silk. (”We turned ties into pants,” Elbaz’s coconspirator Lucas Ossendrijver laughed.) It was typically…glamorous…and, as such, in keeping with the whisper of transgression that has always trailed behind Lanvin menswear. That held true even though, for the first time, the collection actually mixed both of the label’s collections for men, the classic and the more adventurous “garde-robe”—a development reflecting the designers’ conviction that menswear is no longer about “one man in a suit, another in a printed silk T-shirt.”
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