CASELY-HAYFORD F/W 2015 MENSWEAR

LONDON, UNITED KINGDOM [JANUARY 11, 2015] – Casely-Hayford is a trend fot itself this season. Sometimes, the outfits of the fashion week season does not emerge until the season really arrives. All in the week, everywhere menswear week, one explicit garment has been not possible to miss — the daring black-and-white patterned Ashmore overcoat that anchored Casely-Hayford’s AW14 collection. It has been on the backs of bloggers, editors, celebrities and stylists, an proper and eloquent illustration of that show’s dramatic impact.

There was rather more there to that runway, of course; burn wood prints, broken layers, hybrid clothing, staggered proportions. however the money shot, whether or not as an Instagram snap or a shiny editorial shoot, inevitably turned around those surprising monochrome bands.

Today’s grungy collection didn’t feature such a single-minded star — which isn’t by any means a negative. Instead, the clever, resonant complexity which has become the father-and-son team’s signature took its turn in the spotlight. Each look was a pile up of disparate, interwoven threads of British fashion iconography — soft-shouldered suits, slumped sweaters, dandy brocades, drooping shirts, military gear, sturdy outerwear. The palette — khaki green and alarm orange, navy and fuchsia, Crimson and dove — built up a new hierarchy of opposites, deconstructed and reassembled into random new collisions of form and texture.  Formal jackets came banded with strips of graphic knit, and sweatshirts with unbuttoned shirt panels fused to their fronts. It made for a playful, compellingly styled depiction of modern menswear’s fractured mood — not least in the return of those powerful Ashmore stripes, reincarnated as contrast strips, panels of tone-on-tone padding, or woven into out-of focus plaid patchworks.