Matthew Miller (Q3339)
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Matthew Miller is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Matthew Miller |
Matthew Miller is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
For Spring, Matthew Miller called his collection “Paradise Lost,” the invitation for which featured a glitchy, burning palm tree image surrounded by a reddened, poisoned sky. That idea, and the visualization of such, has been seen around as a motif in recent seasons (most notably with Palm Angels), and Miller was smart to present a more austere interpretation of the theme on his runway this afternoon.“I think,” said Miller preshow, “that in the last decade we’ve gone through real political upheaval and new ways of thinking. I think the evolution of that is that we’re going into a revolution, in terms of materials, and the ways we work with them.” To that point, the designer partnered with K-Swiss to create 100 percent recycled sportswear, made entirely from old merchandise. The effort yielded results with a clever aesthetic trick: the garments appeared completely new. “When you see it,” said Miller, “it looks like normal sportswear. Sometimes when you get into recycled, itlooksrecycled.”So: sustainability presented through, or combined with, a stringent miscellany of cargo hoodies, mock flack vests, metallic suiting and coats, neon jumpers, and even an outsize tee, with the K-Swiss logo, the dot between the K and the S turned into a recycling icon. Luggage was also introduced, in partnership with the label Peli: hard-sided cases “that can be dropped off a building, and are made to last a lifetime.” And despite the variance of the aforementioned—fluorescents to hard blacks to industrial foils—Miller’s typically strong tailoring and underlying pulse-reading on tumult was what held this together, and successfully so. It was Paradise Lost, for the moment, but with a solution in the works, even though what’s over the horizon might, in the end, be an inferno.
9 June 2018
No runway, no models for Matthew Miller this season: Instead, he threw a three-bill gig in a dive under railway arches—and dressed the performers in a collection called Riot. “There’s this underground music scene, really good 19, 20, 21-year-olds, who can’t afford gigs, but they can really play—and they have something to say. There was a long time when music didn’t have that, but now it’s back. And I wanted to give them a chance.”Casting on Spotify and YouTube, Matthews found two groups from Brighton, White Room and Strange Cages, and Ekeno, a Grime poet from Tottenham in north London. Before it started, Ekeno discussed what he was going to put into his spoken word piece. “I’m talking about my life. Last year someone I knew was shot in the head, and someone was lost, stabbed. I’m speaking about nonviolence, telling people to be peaceful.”Matthew Miller has always been a designer whose hinterland is left-wing politics and masculine protest—and in all the ways those things might come out, articulately, or angrily. It’s one thing to romanticize teen energy through the filters of hindsight—there are many designers who fetishize such a state—but quite another to connect with the generation which is facing today’s realities. Another, still, to put them in clothes that chime as relevant to their situation. Miller said he wanted them to look like “a new, underground, simmering military.”In practice, the Matthew Miller tendency is half toward flag-waving, urban-protest style, half toward tailoring. He had banners, worn as scarves, printed with tendentious words such asconsent,lascivious, andsalacious(what exactly he hinted at begs to be examined further, in the light of day); nylon bombers modeled on police uniforms; and jackets with “canisters to hold spray paint.” Generalized rage, the eternal thrust of youth sexuality sublimated through music—all that was there, counterpointed by Miller’s more grown-up, drapey cool-ster jackets and coats. What did Ekeno think about the tuxedo jacket Miller gave him to perform in? “Yeah, well, I’m obviously more used to the trackies. But my mum, she’ll be proud.”
6 January 2018
Matthew Miller has always been one of London’s more overtly flag-waving political designers (meaning literally: Men have walked wrapped in slogan flags depicting issues in his shows before now). So at this particular juncture in British and world politics, it was unexpected to see him not making any campaigning point—and in a show in a medieval church in the city, at that. Why no topical commentary, Mr. Miller? ”Well, my whole point was that I, and people my age, felt that the generation below us, would eventually start shouting. And now, they are,” he said.True. Signs are that the engagement of first-time voters in the British democratic system have shifted the needle to the Left in ways that show their voices—previously self-silenced by apathy—are now a force to be reckoned with. Circling back to Miller in his church surroundings, it was not as if he’d gone conformist. The procession he sent down the aisle wasn’t exactly an ecclesiastical one—more an etiolated group of kids in smeared black lipstick dragged in from underground clubs in skinny ’90s tailoring and long, greasy hair.Or that was the at-first-sight impression. The truth is that Miller is focused every bit as much on product as politics. His show notes credited the British manufacturers he collabs with, especially highlighting the raincoats traditionally made by the British manufacturers Hancock. In a Brexit situation, supporting working-class specialist skills in local areas is among the most relevant stances a fashion designer can take. Never mind the message, look at that particular product. It was great.
10 June 2017
“It’s about how a generation are a product of fear politics in a post-truth world. It’s created a collection of individuals who are afraid to act.” Matthew Miller was quoting Franklin D. Roosevelt’s 1933 inaugural speech by calling his collection Fear Itself. Noses were bloodied and bloodred trickled in places. The walking wounded of the Brexit era are everywhere on the London men’s runways. But how to clothe them?Dystopian dress is a hard sell in any circumstances, unless you happen to be Rick Owens, perhaps. Yet despite Miller’s use of his backstage platform to put over forthright views, he isn’t really in fashion to be a full-on dramatist. His subtexts are subsumed and honed into straightforward tailoring, Crombie coats, references to militaria, and technically sophisticated fabrics. It’s city survivalwear, he described in his collection notes, as meeting “the subconscious longing for security that will never subside.”
7 January 2017
Chatting backstage before his Spring show, designerMatthew Milleroffered the phrase “defunct garments.” He was speaking to a somewhat abstract idea of “bringing back” clothes, in a styling sense, that were favored by early-era skinheads. In essence: “things just found at a junk sale,” layered on and tossed over the body, in a moment that no longer exists.Yet the results were far from junky or unconsidered: Miller presented a mesmerizing collection of men’s and womenswear (there are lots of women on the London Collections: Men runways, by the way), which struck a deeply resonant chord, one of beautiful failure, of acceptability in individuality—even loneliness—and of a vague yet universal wonder in implosion. It was amassiveimprovement over last season.Pointing to a logo reading “NEGASONIC TEENAGE WARHEAD,” which was printed on T-shirts and safety-pinned to the back of a black topcoat, Miller said: “It’s a song title from a band in Los Angeles in the ’90s. They totally failed, which I kind of love.” He couldn’t even remember the group’s name. That, on top of the suggestive phrasing, set the tone for other moments of introspective melancholy. One look featured a jacket and jeans in what seemed to be bleached denim. The pieces were actually screened with an interpretation of the paintingA Study of Clouds and Trees, by the British romantic artist John Constable, completed in 1821. Miller picked the artwork as an anchor for Spring, because he liked the idea of “solitary cloud-gazing.” (There was also a fresco of the painting done in Miller’s early 1980s council house—another layer of memory and, perhaps, struggle.) Those clouds would be reformatted in a rough cotton and linen blend, which the designer used to craft the best bomber of the season so far, along with pooling, sloppy trousers. A blue-checked motif sprung up on silks; latte-hued knits were layered under jackets, black kimonos fluttered beneath blazers.“It’s a play on what the original kind of skinhead aesthetic was,” said Miller. “It was quite romantic . . . it’s kind of absolute freedom.” And even though he claimed to have depoliticized the collection—he usually has something to say, but opted not to, because “everyone is doing it"—there were still tones, maybe, of disheartened civic observation. See: the pins, which surfaced in droves throughout the lineup. Each one held a real butterfly’s wing. That makes you wonder—if it’s absolute freedom Miller is after, might that only exist in . . .
death? Or, at the very least, permanent separation or distance from it all? It’s not often that you think about these things at a fashion show, but as Q Lazzarus’s performance of William Garvey’s “Goodbye Horses” wailed out during the finale, you couldn’t help but revel in the beautiful, pensive darkness.
11 June 2016
“I didn’t want it to be a pastiche rebellion,” said a typically antiestablishmentMatthew Millerbackstage at his Fall show. “I wanted it to be more sophisticated, more intelligent, where you’re not lashing out at the world with a fist.” He was explaining the collection’s concept, which was conceived as a kind of takedown of the old guard (which, in turn, functioned as a double fuck you, because Miller also proposed that the current generation’s intellectual wealth is pilfered from dead establishments—so, a theft, then a bullet). There was also further description of aesthetically mixing the then and the now, but all of it turned out to be confusing rhetoric for clothes that were ultimately pretty straightforward.A shearling collar bomber jacket worn over a heathered silver felt topcoat with matching trousers perked up an eyebrow or two in the front row. Yet the look didn’t feel rebellious, nor particularly sophisticated and intelligent. It read simply as a solid mix of wardrobe go-tos. The same was true of the look topped off with a peaked lapel wool overcoat in midnight blue—easy, done. More obvious nods to Miller’s wellspring, like a repurposing of Caravaggio’sDavid With the Head of Goliathon a frayed trench, just seemed redundant (Givenchy ostensibly rules the heavy-handed imagery-screened-on-outsize-daywear trade), as opposed to revolutionary. Ironically, in this lineup Miller’s clothes were best when the dissonance between his theme and his clothing wasgreatest. It made one think about the collection he’d produce without all the turbulent chatter behind it.
9 January 2016
One of the most striking outfits in Matthew Miller's Spring presentation featured a smartly tailored blazer over a linen tunic that hung in shredded tatters. Miller said that was how he felt after two months of writing a business plan to submit to the BFC/GQDesigner Menswear Fund. (Patrick Grant of E. Tautz was the eventual winner.) "Writing and writing and writing," Miller groaned. "And I'm not a writer." By the end of it all he was, he insisted, in a destructive mood. But none of that came through in the collection he showed today, aside from the odd tatter and Jehnny Beth savagely declaiming "Don't let the fuckers get you down" against an aural mesh of chainsaw guitars.Miller never met a manifesto he didn't like. His new keywords wereconform/control/constrict,reflecting his state of mind when he was designing the clothes. But where he'd once have attached the actual words themselves to the looks—clothing as confrontation—here he dialed down the aggression, choosing instead to convey his mood through fabrics. Cotton was double-bonded with a metal alloy to create a perma-crinkle. Linen was perma-creased to match. Miller liked the idea that they somehow twisted around the body, contorting it. So when he tailored the most conventional pieces from the materials—a suit, a coat, a jacket, pants, a shift—he was actually subverting them. But before the subversion, he offered his own version of the items that in his mind represented the constriction of all that time he spent working on his business plan: dark suit, white shirt, narrow tie, and big black oxfords by Robert Clergerie. A business uniform, in other words.If it all sounds fiercely conceptual, the clothes themselves had a chilly, edgy chic, even at their crinkliest. They were outfits for a retro-future world (Gattaca?It's always a joy to make that connection.) And despite the dystopian flourish of what looked like stock tags attached to the wrists of his models—the ultimate commodification of human beings—Miller ended his show on an upbeat note, with the line "You got the love I need to see me through" chorusing through the finale. "I'm growing up," he conceded.
13 June 2015
Matthew Miller's view of life is anything but rose-tinted. Decay and destruction are his default positions. "I can't help it, it's in my nature," he acknowledged cheerfully today. His new collection was labeled Resistant, according to the hang-tags that dangled from many of the garments. Maybe that meant contrariness, which would certainly fit with Miller's state of mind, but it also referred to the flame-retardant quality of the upholstery fabrics he used for the clothes. He's been collaborating with Kvadrat, one of Europe's top textile companies, for a few seasons now, so the quality of the cloth was plain to see, but Miller ravaged it, ripping, tearing, shredding, then stitching it all back together and slapping patches of a deconstructed MA1 jacket on top. He thought of those patches as bits of armor. It's a hard world, after all.Miller's a conceptual designer. The expensive furniture that his fabrics would normally be covering were, to him, symbols of a long-gone lifestyle—"everything we will never be." That might suggest a certain amount of resentment was being released in the way he abused said cloth, except for the fact that the result was actually quite pleasing. It was artisanal, gentle, even pretty, with all the collaged fabrics and fringing that softened the hems of tunic tops and rimmed the exaggerated tongues on the shoes. Same thing with coats subtly patterned as though they were vaguely infected with something. Again, surprisingly attractive (with covered buttons signposting the care that had been lavished on them). "It's the texture of life," said Miller. "When you rub or scar it, it becomes something beautiful." And that will always be the silver lining in his cloud.
10 January 2015
Matthew Miller's show struck one chord over and over and over, but my oh my, how hard that chord hit. He labeled his collection "Introversion" and claimed it was a "response to the hopelessness of war." The words he printed on straps of Velcro grosgrain—YOU, ANTI-, WAR, SOCIETY—could be recombined any old way to amplify his message: War is anti-you and anti-society. And his invitation seemed to be a redacted version of the conditions of a court-martial. "I can't help but be like this," Miller said, by way of explaining his uncompromising stance. "It's just an osmosis of what's going on. All war does is create more war."When British soldiers were demobilized after the Second World War, they were given a cheap-as-chips, one-size-fits-all suit—double-breasted, wide-legged, usually pinstriped—in which they were expected to re-enter civilian life. And then, like millions of soldiers before and after, they found themselves isolated by their experience, alienated from the world around them, forced inward. Introverted. When Miller was a child, his grandfather's "demob" suit hung on the wall, like an icon. Today, he tore that suit to bits—conceptually, of course—shredding, patchworking, in an effort, he claimed, "to make it more relevant for the modern man." Miller pleated pinstripes, layered them in a shoulder-buttoned tunic, collaged them into an op-art patchwork, wrapped them in scraps round the feet. The sense of encroaching disorder was ameliorated by lovely wrist corsages and necklets. Or was it? The naturalness of the trailing flowers and greenery amplified theun-naturalness of what humankind has done with the world it's claimed dominion over. Even the handful of exceptionally pretty girls Miller integrated into his march-past was, according to the designer, an effort to underscore that we'reallin this together. There is no escape.Cheerful in his nihilism, Miller had a quick-fire response when he was complimented on his fearlessness. "You call it fearless? Maybe I'm just naive." In which case, he is merely the latest in a long and illustrious lineage of artists who would challenge a status quo that, over and over, compels the world to conflict.
14 June 2014