Hardy Amies (Q1903)
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British fashion house
- Hardy Amies PLC
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Hardy Amies |
British fashion house |
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Statements
Darren Barrowcliff is still new atHardy Amies, a Savile Row stalwart known, at times, for breaking the street’s longstanding formal boy’s club codes. For Spring he reveled in the house’s mild anti-establishment lean in creating a solid collection that felt fresh for the block—something we’ve seen Savile Row’s denizens try more and more in recent times, with varying degrees of success.Most exciting to see was denim. Barrowcliff showed some really lovely pieces, inspired by archival Hardy Amies designs (see! The man was unconventional for his address), including a hand-washed bleach jacket, and trousers with finely frayed hems, which will be about as natty an option as any beachgoing Englishman will find come next summer. Other points of interest included a wheat-color mac trench with a high-necked closure, an Italian cotton “blouson” (anorak) with nickel trimming, and a thinly chic unstructured tuxedo in black wool. As Barrowcliff mentioned, Hardy Amies has an “innovative past.” He can now add a new chapter of smartly creative thinking to the register.
11 June 2016
“The concept is without,” said Darren Barrowcliff,Hardy Amies’s head of design, while surveying his 14-look collection on a phalanx of models arranged at The Arts Club of Mayfair, London. It’s a sound bite fashion journalists are hearing more and more of backstage; designers are sidestepping the à la mode for the gut, and doing what feels right and what feels, ultimately, true. For Barrowcliff, a return to “classic Savile Row lines with softness” was his instinct. For the most part, it worked.Previously, Hardy Amies had used its Savile Row ancestry as a spine of sorts. Around it, a conceptual and technical rib cage grew (Amies himself wasn’t afraid of moving past traditionalism; he designed the costumes for2001: A Space Odysseyand was the first in London to stage a men’s fashion show, at the Savoy, in 1961). But with Barrowcliff in the driver’s seat (he replaced Mehmet Ali), the label’s new look is much more pared back, a gentlemanly dark-wood closet full of woven cashmeres and alpaca yarns, with a softness in break and silhouette suggesting, additionally, a heavier emphasis on luxury. (Tony Dover Street and a pearly white Aston Martin parked outside certainly helped with that aura.) The best of the lot was a double-breasted wool suit—its pants came with an expertly cut-and-placed cargo pocket. Standouts included a “cognac”-color car coat in alpaca and a shawl-collared cashmere tuxedo, which Barrowcliff counted among his favorites.There wasn’t anything particularlyoriginalhere, though; you’ve seen these clothes before, but maybe that’s the point, maybe that’s the aforementioned eschewing of seasonality. Men will wear them. But cultivating some kind of signature wouldn’t hurt, as the Savile Row aesthetic is readily available and almost overdefined, planet-wide. There should be atinybit more edge or differentiating identity to gild all the finery.
9 January 2016
When Hardy Amies designed the costumes for Stanley Kubrick's2001: A Space Odysseyin 1968, he based the scenes set on Earth on his own 1960s tailoring. But as soon as the movie moved out into space, the costumes became more free-form—from space suits in bright colors to egg-shaped flight stewardess' hats. Creative director Mehmet Ali took Amies' work on the iconic film as his reference point for the Spring collection, reworking it into a story about innovation and exploration. Clearly, in Ali's mind, modern masculinity is in essence the will to be a pioneer, to break new ground. It is a heroic vision.There is just one nut to crack for a brand with roots on Savile Row (even though Amies was at the forefront of ready-to-wear back in the day) and a favorite of the Queen during the 1950s: How do you stay true to your heritage when your ideal is "to boldly go where no man has gone before," as they used to say onStar Trek? Backstage Ali spoke of his fascination with all the fabric innovations that had come through space-travel research, and it was clear that it was here that he saw the possibility of progress for menswear. There was an amazing lightweight material Ali called "filtration rib," used in blazers and pants, and that felt like liquid fabric to the touch, while laser-cutting was used to create transparency effects on outerwear, making layering more interesting (and possibly, more challenging).These were clothes for the so-called yummies (young urban males), affluent and impeccably groomed, and they were in abundance in the audience. In many ways, the clothes told an interesting story about many of today's guys as both traditionalist and forward-looking: Strip away the layer of techno garments here, and what remained was a 1960s suit. If you could see beyond that, the pieces that stood out—like a transparent black, white, and neon yellow hooded training jacket in parachute nylon—really did feel like they aimed at the future.
13 June 2015
For some reason men are less adaptable than women when it comes to clothes, and menswear is often more about following conventions than breaking with them. With that being the case, one must look at a collection like the one shown by Hardy Amies and the brand's creative director, Mehmet Ali, as a story about perfection, not revolution. (In 1964 Hardy Amies wroteABC of Men's Fashion,and 50 years later its ideas of what a gentleman does or doesn't do are still articulated in men's fashion magazines and on shopping sites.)Ali went trekking to the top of Mount Snowdon in Wales, and while there he got the idea to base his fall collection around British mountaineering and the Three Peaks Challenge (to climb the highest mountains in Scotland, England, and Wales in 24 hours). He borrowed the color palette from Snowdon, by way of J. M. W. Turner, the British master of landscape painting. The collection was, in Ali's words, about modern man's struggle: The reward is reaching the top, naturally. A climber's tube rope morphed into flannel suiting as a graphic, woven pattern and ran through the collection, while bouclé wool evoked the slopes of Snowdon—a world of terra-cotta hues, clay blue, and deep green. Layering was used efficiently, mixing knitwear and tailoring (and sometimes sportswear), as in a look where a turtleneck was worn with two jackets and a coat, all in shades of gray. It didn't look fussy, which must be considered a feat.The tailoring might be the main story here, and as expected, it was impeccable, shown in very British fabrics—matte rather than shiny. But what really made you appreciate the intricacies of the clothing was Ali's explanation that he'd used traditional, teasel-brushed wool, a more or less obsolete technique (there are only a couple of places left in Britain that do it). That it wasn’t a revolution was a moot point.
10 January 2015
In his 1964 manualABC of Men's Fashion,the late Sir Hardy Amies wrote that it is the duty of the British designer to produce clothes that are "unmistakably British but never aggressively insular," and it might well be the case that current Hardy Amies design director Mehmet Ali has taken him at face value in terms of looking beyond the island's shores. Spring '15 saw the venerable house look askance at the traditional values of its Savile Row neighbors, gazing instead toward the balmier climes of Brentwood, California, where Amies formed a close friendship with interior designer William Haines, former matinee idol and later decorator to luminaries such as Betsy Bloomingdale and Ronald and Nancy Reagan.Not only did Haines create the Hardy Amies geometric monogram (used to great effect here on embossed leather holdalls), but his decidedly West Coast aesthetic also translated into a balmy color palette of soft chambray blues, coral, pistachio, and egg-yolk yellow (think organic free range). For Spring, it was most notably seen in a zip-front leather blouson and a yachting parka inspired by Haines and Amies' sailing trips along the Pacific coast.Despite the Hardy Amies' HQ being located in an august address on Savile Row, looking at the label's archives has actually allowed Ali to be a little more iconoclastic than his more traditional contemporaries. "People assume that this was a house in the traditional bespoke mold, but it's the setting rather than the product, as Amies menswear has always been about ready-to-wear," he said. This idea led to a largely semi-structured jacket collection, but in shorter proportions than the standard British block (Amies might have sniffily referred to them as bum freezers). There was also a longer double-breasted bridge jacket—a derivation of the peacoat, which, according to Ali, was only worn by officers of sufficient seniority to navigate a ship.Maritime history aside, Amies' home ranges from the seventies were also referenced, in woven chevrons and an upended diamond-grid motif that was subtle in chambray but less so at the brighter ends of the palette, despite being executed in hopsack canvas and linen-silk mixes. In fact, those pieces went against another of Amies' sayings, that a man should look as if he bought his clothes with intelligence, put them on with care, and then forgot all about them.
These clothes were anything but forgettable, a circumstance that may owe something to the fact that Ali cut his design teeth at Reiss, the premium High Street retailer, and is well aware that a young metropolitan consumer is very comfortable investing in color and pattern as opposed to a generic charcoal two-piece. Ali is entering his fourth season for the house, and he was pleased to report that the brand is continuing to make headway in taste-making stores worldwide for the first time in its almost-seventy-year history.
14 June 2014
Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.
5 January 2014
The emphasis that Hardy Amies places on "Made in England" rings true for a company whose namesake got to hang with crowned heads, even in those days when designers were considered hired help. But if English craftsmanship detailed the new collection—the handmade leather holdall, the silk jacquard weave of an evening jacket—creative director Claire Malcolm had her own fantasy. She imagined the strictness of the early twentieth-century Bauhaus design movement applied to classic English tailoring, with artists Josef and Anni Albers fronting up to Balmoral, the royal retreat in the Scottish Highlands where Amies himself would join the king and queen for a summer vacation in the thirties. It wasn't a particularly promising proposition, but it actually turned out to be a perfectly harmonious union. Bauhaus line-and-square blockiness loaned itself to a new tartan, as in a checked cape, or a matching coat and jacket. And when Malcolm applied the angular rigor of the Bauhaus to tailoring, she got the kind of streamlined, cropped suiting that might make lean young men feel like dressing up for the city. True, the boots and backpacks hinted at gentlemanly hikes in the Highlands, but Malcolm managed to dodge the bullet of deadly heritage. Her Amies was true.
8 January 2013
Israeli artist Ori Gersht's video of a vase of flowers exploding in slo-mo made a curious intro to the Paris debut of Hardy Amies' menswear. Apparently there was something in theZabriskie Pointviolence of the piece that helped creative director Claire Malcolm connect Hardy's life (including wartime adventures that are the stuff of spy movies) with his art—or at least his craft as a designer. Grace under pressure? That, at least, would have co-joined the ever-calm and charming Malcolm with the long-gone man whose name is on the label.By a curious coincidence, the show took place in the same space where, a few years ago, Carlo Brandelli resuscitated Kilgour, another Savile Row heritage label. The brilliance of that particular effort blazed all too briefly before some cockamamy business decisions deep-sixed it. You could certainly wish for a happier ending for Malcolm, especially after the collection she showed today, with its quietly luxe restraint. The show was bookended by white double-breasted suits—one for day, one for evening—which was a clear and clever way for Malcolm to set out her stall as a mean tailor. Between the two, she mulled over men's clothes as Amies himself might have worn them, with a military inflection during the Second World War, as a peacock in peacetime. If knits tucked into pleated shorts looked a little sissy, that was a slip in the styling, which otherwise maintained a cool, sartorial precision. One might have hoped for a little more rub (Amies himself was notoriously contrary), but the eye-popping op effect of one dinner jacket hinted at the delightful excesses Malcolm may be capable of as her confidence grows.
26 June 2012
If the late Sir Hardy Amies crosses anyone's radar now, it's usually as the man who was official dressmaker to the Queen until his retirement in 1989. His impact on the history of menswear has been largely sidelined. And yet he dressed the likes of Cary Grant from his Savile Row headquarters, and he was forward-thinking enough to put his men's collection on the catwalk a good 50 years ago, in a show with a soundtrack, a set, and a designer's bow at the finale, all of them previously unheard of. Like all self-inventions, Amies was supremely confident in his own judgment. "Who was the greatest person you've ever met?" he was once asked. "Me," came the instant response.Is that reason enough to run the Amies brand up the flagpole one more time and see who salutes? Li & Fung, the Chinese multinational who is its current owners, clearly think so. Wednesday night saw the debut at Pitti Uomo in Florence of the new collection from recently installed design director Claire Malcolm, after which there was a dinner at the Palazzo Borghese with a guest of honor, the impressively sonorous Prince Michael of Kent, who's been keeping that royal connection alive.After the show, Malcolm defined her challenge as "reinventing the gentleman." And, given the chance, she's going to do it one item at a time. Here, she started with the gray flannel suit. "I like the conflicting messages it can send," she said. "It can seem utterly conventional or extremely glamorous." Working with every possible weave of flannel specially commissioned from flannel specialists Fox Brothers & Co., Malcolm offered both options and more, although she wrapped her straight suit in a huge muffler to give it some added allure. When the fabric was woven with reflective thread, it had the silvery sheen of a Hollywood movie in the thirties. The styling amplified the matinee idol mood. Malcolm used the kaleidoscopic effects of Busby Berkeley's classicGold Diggers of 1933as inspiration for the patterns on silk shirts and dinner jackets and the specially commissioned Globe-Trotter cases. Marc Hare's nickel-toed shoes added another flash of old Hollywood glam.But references aside, this was no wallow in past glories. After years of experience on Savile Row, Malcolm speaks the language of contemporary menswear fluently. You could see that in the precise proportions and, even more, in the curious interplay between hard and soft. "That masculine-feminine thing is there all the time," she acknowledged.
She herself is a fascinating physical embodiment of it, and that helps make her one to watch. Though we surely wouldn't care to know what Hardy himself would have to say about that.
10 January 2012