John Varvatos (Q4579)
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American international luxury men’s lifestyle brand
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | John Varvatos |
American international luxury men’s lifestyle brand |
Statements
2000
creative director
John Varvatos, who regularly trades in louche rocker angst and rebel dandyism, has plenty to say about the current state of affairs. And with so many of those affairs jostling for airtime and headspace—Dreamers, knee-taking, #MeToo, #MenToo, all while the last day of the economic forum in Davos loomed large—he summed up his overarching sentiment with one word,Equality, spelled out in caps across the tee he wore for his postshow bow. Except it wasn’t so much a bow as a salute-cum-protest. Perfectly in sync with his army of models, he solemnly, stoically placed his hand to his heart for a long moment while Jimi Hendrix’s searing guitar rendition of the national anthem, originally performed at Woodstock in 1969, blared.It was Grammy-worthy staging—in fact, he moved his show up a week from the regular New York men’s calendar to coincide with the awards—that whipped the audience into whooping applause. Varvatos, it would appear, was throwing his lot in with the protest set, and without sacrificing his celebrity fan base, who today included the Jonas brothers, causing a flurry of camera phones. Every noble deed begins with noble purpose. Anyway, who’d turn down the noble optics? “I’m using my voice,” he said during a walk-through before the show. “I’m shaking shit up.”The clothes, too, conveyed a new awareness, a sartorial response to troubled times. Varvatos focused his attention on men’s classics in stark monochrome, removing all nonessential fuss and adding back visual interest in the form of crinkling and distressing. Fingerless gloves, basic black beanies, disheveled ombré scarves, and chunky desert boots or weathered trainers rounded out the dissident vibe. A simple leather backpack had been hand-stained to striking dégradé effect.Varvatos also liberated the suit, separating pants from jackets, which were more often paired with dangerously skinny pants—apparently the comeback is already nigh—that were stuffed into thick woolen socks. But it was the outerwear that particularly stood out. There were some real beauts here, from washed velvet bombers and slouchy sweater dusters to one serious leather parka and several long coats splotch-dyed to resemble either friendly clouds or menacing shadows, depending how you take your resistance.
29 January 2018
Like everyone else right now, John Varvatos is seeking meaning. As he articulated backstage before his Fall show, held in the Weimar-like Diamond Horseshoe cabaret in Times Square, the Varvatos guy aches to be wild and spontaneous, yet he’s also feeling careful and thinking about longevity. He relishes the past, but he’s irrevocably drawn to the future. The worddepthpopped up a couple of times, and in that moment it seemed as if he were skating along a double entendre—referring to the collective bigger picture as much as the collection’s micro-details. Was he? “You mean all the shit that’s been going on? Oh,yeah.”But this was a cultivated expression of restless angst, a “nonchalant cool,” he said. While a rock ’n’ roll vibe is never far from the surface (and there was, again, that trusted contingent of elder-statesman rockers in attendance), that surface now seemed burnished with a moody dandyism. How else to explain lynx prints, washed velvet, and cracked leather? There had been, however, a tip-off. In the lead-up to the show, the designer Instagrammed vintage pics of Alice Cooper and Iggy Pop, both with an animal element in the frame and the latter working one of his swishier poses.If a coat defines a man, Varvatos has at least found meaning in that. Here, his coats and jackets—tonal, layered, featherlight, and fiercely unslouchy—dominated the 40-some looks. Think double-breasted, button-festooned jackets; simpler striped blazers; a leather car coat; slim officer jackets; a lounge jacket lined in leopard print; a biker, of course; and one very shaggy piece with a dropped collar (okay, that one was slouchy). “I feel like the days of wearing a big shearling coat without much underneath are over,” Varvatos mused. And with that, another double entendre: “This isn’t the climate we’re used to. We need to dress differently. It needs to be a refined rebellion.”
3 February 2017
John Varvatos’s man, to use fashionspeak, has been undergoing a transformation in recent seasons. He’s been morphing from affected rocker dandy to something a little more grounded, less peacocky. As Varvatos explained before the show, for Spring he was thinking of “urban romantics,” most definitely intending the contradictory references.There was indeed an urgent wistfulness to the collection, with the shaggy-haired, vampire-thin models charging out of the darkness of the dungeonlike subterranean nightclub. Varvatos blended hard and soft, crisp and rumpled, shiny and matte to emphasize the complexity of his protagonist. Collars were held up with internal wires; gray linen suits, some double-face, were woven with metallic fibers; a modified black fencing jacket was fully trimmed with buttons; and a moto jacket was elongated to duster length. Jackets were often paired with matching vests or only a loose tank, and most looks were worn with narrow boots and a scarf tied nonchalantly.For the most part, Varvatos ably realized the scruffy, raffish poet look he was going for, a worldly chap in vaguely vintage threads, harking back to another time and place. “Like something out of old Provence,” the designer said, “that transcends modern notions of athleisure or whatever buzzwords are floating around now.”
18 July 2016
John Varvatos' collections are often less about the clothes than they are a rock-and-roll attitude, the kind the Detroit native has been ventriloquizing since launching his men's label in New York in the late 1990s. So when an endearingly crotchety old rocker in the crowd muttered, "I'm too old for this shit," it was unclear whether he was grousing about the fashionably late start time or the crush of photographers jostling for his attention—or something else altogether.Attitude or not, there's something refreshing about a designer who'd rather talk about a halcyon music scene than the particulars of a jacket, as was Varvatos' wont before the show. "Oh, man," he said, "I was thinking about the mid-'70s rock scene in Southern California, the clubs in the Laurel Canyon area where the Stones and Zeppelin and Fleetwood Mac played. It was all so relaxed and bohemian."Those early rock nightclubs of L.A. proved irresistible to Varvatos (whose store took up residence in the former CBGB on the Bowery after the storied club was forced out by the landlord). But he didn't go wild. He kept things pared down, sticking to respectable stripes and harmless solids—in rich tones that recalled lighting gels—while wisely eschewing some of the glam-rock elements of collections past. Which is to say, showier jackets didn't reach tailcoat proportions, nor did various dandy-inspired looks wander into the fancy domain of Beau Brummell. So inoffensive was this offering that one craved subversion, an omission, a perceived slight…anything. Now where did that senior rocker go?
16 July 2015
In search of inspiration for Fall '15, John Varvatos looked out his window, over Central Park, and thought of a favorite Richard Avedon portrait of Bob Dylan, shot there in 1965. "He looks like a young man does today," said Varvatos. "He doesn't look like the Beatles; he looks contemporary."Hence, an extended riff on Dylan set on a runway littered with humus-tanged leaves supposed to re-create Poet's Walk. Look 9 apart, that riff was actually pretty loose: There were leopard-skin bags, but not hats; those were Slash-style toppers, including one that boldly matched the broad gray check of the belted coat below it. And although there weren't many of them, there were still some of the Spinal Tap-esque, virtual-vasectomy leather trousers that are one of Varvatos' great loves.More broadly, the show was like a mostly so-so concept album blessed with a couple of nailed-on hits. A short, small-pocketed brown suede jacket was all the better for this season's button restraint. A shaggy-hemmed shearling overcoat was just what people used to look for at Camden Market but could never find. If you're slim and like a biker worn over a suit, see look 38. Despite a slightly odd ticket pocket at the right breast and another "What's that for?" extra pocket at the left, a khaki three-piece suit with (excellent) front-man boots looked convincingly Rock God. For night there was berry and black peak-lapelled, fitted suiting sprinkled with beading, set off by polo-neck shirts, some fastened with poppers. There was also a black three-piece, peppered with gray splotches. This was solid fare for the constituency of bedroom rock stars—and more than a few real ones—that Varvatos has so assiduously made his own. Altering the lineup too radically would be pointless: As Dylan himself once sang, "You're gonna have to serve somebody."
17 January 2015
A new way of dressing during the day—that's what John Varvatos proposed with his Spring collection. Why we need such a thing is unclear, but he made the case with lots of washed, wrinkled, and heavily textured fabrics; dramatically reimagined suits and tuxes; and light layers that almost always included a delicate scarf worn undone, tucked beneath a vest.Close inspection of the materials revealed unique, intricate effects like a herringbone weave that dissolved into gray, a gauzy knit with tinsel-like fibers woven into the fabric to create metallic striations, and jacquard woven to look like reptile skin. Clearly the attention to detail was meticulous, but the most notable aspect of the collection was its insistence on trying to reinvent the cut of a jacket. Lapels were lopped off. Length was added and pockets were put on seams. The vent on a tailcoat was cut with three slits—apparently neither the single nor the double vent is sufficient for this new daytime dress code. Some version of a cutaway coat appeared again and again, seemingly just so its wearer could reveal the fringy ends of his summer scarf.Taking an unorthodox approach to traditional menswear is nothing new for Varvatos, and he's built a big enough clientele to prove that he's doing something right. Still, it would be interesting to see how he might put all that R&D on materials to work on something less complicated.
20 June 2014
John Varvatos idolizes rock stars. His years-long campaign to be the tailor of record for rock (casting grizzled headliners in his ads, publishingJohn Varvatos: Rock in Fashion, etc.) can't have left any mind unmade that to him, these guys are gods. Or if not gods, their mortal second-bests: superheroes. The designer effectively confirmed the theory tonight. It was superheroes, he said, that inspired the new collection. Coming off a new ad campaign with hard rock's tireless costumed crusaders, Kiss, he'd thought about how to bring some of their larger-than-life dash to his collection. So he sprinkled it with what he called magic dust. That was most likely a metaphor. But you couldn't fail to notice that everything literally glittered.The first superhero-to-be was Varvatos favorite Miles McMillan in a motorcycle-style blazer that zipped on the bias and featured shoulder and elbow patches of silver-foiled croc. He and each guy that followed looked like a Varvatos man amplified: one who wore the usual attenuated tailoring accessorized with biker boots, wallet chains, and knotted scarves, but whose jacquarded jacket and tie played tricks with the light, whose jeans came in stretch leather, whose sweater closed with silver toggles like little stakes. Stardom is a common enough fantasy, though it remains to be seen how many will line up to dress the part. The most extreme pieces, like a black overcoat whose back sprouted what looked like raven's feathers, appeared to be ready for a concert stage, but Varvatos insisted that everything on the runway had been bought for his stores and would be on view in his showroom for any other retailers brave enough to take it on.The encore to the production, such as it was, was a quartet of surprise guests who came out with Varvatos to take his runway bow: Kiss in the flesh, vamping to "Rock and Roll All Nite" with Gene Simmons' yard-long tongue unfurled for the occasion. The band had flown 17 hours to make an appearance, to be capped off by a performance at the show's after-party tonight. Then it would be straight back home to L.A. Backstage, guitarist and vocalist Paul Stanley offered his own critical appraisal of his friend. For him, he said, Varvatos represented not capricious fashion, but timeless style. "John is not a member of the fashion community," he added. "He is a member of the rock 'n' roll community." Then he toddled off to rock and roll all nite.
10 January 2014
John Varvatos has spent several seasons extrapolating the idea of elegance. His customers, he says, want to dress up. "They know how to dress casually," he said after his show. He's offering a crash course in long-legged dressiness: a tall, trim take on suiting that's equal parts classic rocker and Regency fop. (OK, maybe 60-40.) His jackets are elongated, three-button, and given an extra nip in at the waist by a waistcoat; his pants, narrow or boot-cut—a style now so out of general favor that it looks practically extraterrestrial. It gave you cause to consider that the high-water, ankle-baring pant length that currently enjoys near-universal dominance will, sooner or later, inevitably find its own time at an end. But probably not right now, and probably not at these hands.In any case, Varvatos' elegance had a slept-in crumple, its linens creased, its leathers hand-distressed, as if they'd survived weeks on the road. Which is the ultimate Varvatosian fantasy. While working on the collection, he'd been editingJohn Varvatos: Rock in Fashion, a compendium of rock 'n' roll photography, and the influence of elegant, traveling men like Bryan Ferry, David Bowie, and Jimi Hendrix was scrawled here. The show ended with an updated bandleader's jacket, the kind Hendrix liked, worn by a man who may be the closest doppelgänger the modeling world currently offers of Jimi himself.
21 June 2013
John Varvatos spares no expense transforming his frescoed show space at Corso Italia 21. This season's set had metal grates, swirling smoke, and sturdy cables tethering the runway up. It was abstract but familiar, until he clicked the parts together. "I created a bridge crossing an ocean," he said. "We bridged the English dandy and the modern age."The dandy would've been pleased. This collection used velvet by the yard: washed velvet brogues (the designer was wearing a pair himself), velvet motorcycle waistcoats, a velvet tux. There were capes and cutaways and rich jewel tones of garnet and violet. It's the medium, not the message, that's the leap. Varvatos' beloved Detroit scuzz-rockers are all dandies par excellence, and though the materials may have been more precious here than in seasons past, Fall found Varvatos in familiar form. The boot-cut suits, the endless neckerchiefs, vests for days…well, boys keep swinging. Still, the impetus to up the materials—fueled by the designer's ongoing conviction that "guys are dressing up again"—pushed Varvatos to some interesting new finds, like the handwoven ombré fabrics that bled from gray to blue, a year and a half in development.
11 January 2013
Sometimes, zig wants to zag. John Varvatos, king of casual, went elegant. "I just felt like it," he said after the show. "The great thing about being a designer is you can do what you want, and to try to keep yourself interested." The necktie that collared each look gave the hint that all wasn't as it had been. What interests Varvatos now is refinement: a louche, wide-legged variety, fedora-topped, that recalled the thirties as the strutters of the seventies imagined them. Bowie circa Thin White Duke and Brian Jones were the inspirations in chief. So rock hasn't been banished from the house, just tidied up. What he's offering, Varvatos said, is "an elegance that most young people don't know, because they've never dressed up that much. They've worn a suit, but they've never really been elegant." Time regularly replenishes this supply of impressionable youth. Maybe they'll thrill to the strut on show here. That's a cheerful prospect, as is the one that, back in the showroom, much of the stridency will likely be skimmed off the top. The runway is as much a stage as any Bowie ever played. A good thing to remember as you consider the prospect of a generation trailing Varvatos' western fringe behind its formalwear.
22 June 2012
He's a Motor Citizen by birth with a show slot in Milan, but John Varvatos' heart pumps New York blood. For Fall, so does his collection's. The inspiration, he explained, was the city itself, its juxtaposition of old and new. To open the show, Varvatos screened a film that mashed old and new, too: A montage of New York landmarks, from the Chrysler Building to the Guggenheim, set to warp speed and partially animated.When the men finally hit the street, literally—the runway was paved—they represented a similar Bronx-to-the-Battery thoroughness. Varvatos said his emphasis was on pieces rather than outfits, which made for a rather salable offering, with plenty of knits (some elongated to outerwear proportions), curly-haired shearlings, and tailoring, in a palette that began subway-gray and darkened to asphalt.
13 January 2012
Rock 'n' roll forever? The answer's yes if your name is John Varvatos. The designer has made a devotion to the spirit of rock his point of difference in the crowded American sportswear market. The trick is to keep coming up with new riffs for the familiar tunes. Varvatos set out to do that today by referencing the period in the seventies when groups like the Rolling Stones, Led Zeppelin, and The Who retreated to their country estates and returned with some of their best albums. To the pounding chords of "Baba O'Riley," the first model emerged from behind iron gates and made his way along an overgrown paved path, long hair flowing and the tails of his tunic top trailing behind. Varvatos said he was thinking of Jimmy Page circa 1972, but it also brought to mind a similarly garbed Mick Jagger at the infamous Stones concert in London's Hyde Park in 1969.That loose, romantic attitude continued throughout. Knits were slouchy, fencing-style jackets were worn unbuttoned at the top, braided necklaces dangled at the models' sternums. With his astute commercial sense, Varvatos was careful not to let things get too costumey, though. A peaked-lapel, three-piece seersucker suit qualified as pretty traditional, and the hand-painted roses that climbed up the sides of other jackets were as wild as things got. All this was delivered in a palette of gray and sand, and if there were a few too many variations on the same theme, Varvatos largely succeeded in putting a new spin on his rock classics.
17 June 2011
Fall'sJohn Varvatosman is a man on the move. "He started in London and ends up here in Milan," the designer mused before the show. "He traveled by train." And in the Milanese military school where Varvatos showed the collection, an enormous set of gravel-inlaid train tracks stretched out before a station's clock to form the runway. His long-haired waifs literally took to the rails to a Black Keys beat.Imagining the necessity of frequent adjustments—for city visits versus small-town sojourns, warmer climes versus colder—Varvatos (and Bill Mullen, his stylist) emphasized mutability. Looks were composites of layers upon layers: Sleeveless coats became vests worn over thick, nubby cardigans; suede biker jackets turned waistcoat when layered under wool overcoats. Texture, whether in the form of hairy sweaters, chemically treated fabrics, or raw edges left raggedy, trumped all. In fact, there was hardly a look without two or three. Piling it on (palimpsest styling, shall we say) is not new. But it added a welcome spark to the Varvatos offering this time around, which in some seasons can feel overfamiliar. The JV staples and standards recur time and again. But here was a reminder that Varvatos—more the train than the traveler—still does his part to push them forward.
14 January 2011
To celebrate the tenth anniversary of his label, John Varvatos staged his Spring show in a Milanese church and invited a wallful of "friends and family" to watch over the proceedings. It was a collage of all the rockers, from Alice to Iggy, who've appeared in his ads, along with others, like Robert Plant, he has met and befriended along the way. Friends with Robert Plant? The music-obsessed kid from Detroit must pinch himself sometimes. He's a man living his dream, and the wardrobe he's created to service it has solidified over the years into a repertoire of outlaw-dandy rocker wear—all skinny silhouettes, vintage tailoring, and washed leathers and suedes, with antique hardware (hook-and-eye closings are a favorite) to make the clothes look like they've been around since the Civil War. Come to that, Civil War military jackets have been another arrow in his creative quiver.He may love it in his music, but the designer isn't about revolution in his fashion. His anniversary collection opened with an over-dyed glen plaid coat, a weathered classic, paired with a matching waistcoat and white jeans—the kind of three-piece dressing that's become a Varvatos staple. The show did, however, inject at least one new element into the designer's vocab. What happens to aging rock dandies? They move to the country. And Varvatos moved along with them, offering a mulberry cable knit with toggle closings or a long, granddadlike Fair Isle cardie, cozy items that could become fireside companions.Still, the most alluring piece in the collection was a taupe biker jacket. There's life in the old boys yet, country or otherwise.
18 June 2010
Style.com did not review the Fall 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
16 January 2010
Style.com did not review the Spring 2010 menswear collections. Please enjoy the photos, and stay tuned for our complete coverage of the Spring 2011 collections, including reviews of each show by Tim Blanks.
22 June 2009
There's all sorts of research that insists if the modern man could do it all again, he'd do it in a band. And John Varvatos would be designing his clothes. Varvatos is most convincing when he's channeling his inner rock star. That's why the standouts from his latest show were items like a silvered leather military jacket, a ponyskin biker jacket, and a glossy black lacquered peacoat. They had the kind of glamour you could imagine the teen Varvatos absorbing fromCreemandCircusmagazines when he was growing up in Michigan. A fringed velvet scarf, a coq feather nonchalantly trailing from a jacket pocket—just the accessories a mirror freak would use while he pranced around his room to Queen or Bowie (unsurprisingly on the soundtrack here).Varvatos seemed to have designed the rest of the collection as a low-key backdrop for those few pieces. The palette was determinedly gray. It was kind of striking in the opener: a tweed tux with a matching wingtip shirt. In fact, the matching suit-and-shirt combo was something of a signature. So was the inventive layering that shrouded special pieces under somber, anonymous wraps: a silvered lambskin jacket under a hooded trench, a vest in quilted crimson leather under a black topcoat. The rocker's heart beats eternal.
3 February 2008
The key to John Varvatos' fashion sensibility might be found in the last outfit that made its way down his catwalk: a tuxedo jacket and jeans. It's a quintessential dressed-up-rocker combo, the sort of thing that a Varvatos fave like Jesse Malin (front-row center, in a painful-looking neck-and-back brace arrangement) might wear to an awards show. Perhaps he'd even tie a silky scarf around his waist, the way Varvatos showed it. The designer made his mark with collections that delivered American frontier spirit with European finesse, and he's gone on honing that proposition (the set—a collage of dusty, cracked old window frames—simultaneously suggested a Wild West ghost town and abandoned buildings in the Eastern bloc). His latest standouts included a fitted, zippered jacket that bloused in the back, a mushroom-toned military jacket, and a slate cotton tux. Given the commercial expansion envisaged for this label, there was a subtle boldness in the light gauge of the knits and the asymmetry of jacket and coat closings. But what would be truly great would be to see Varvatos tapping some of the contrary spirit of his other front-row face: Alice Cooper. Amid all the tastefully subtle aging, dyeing, and tailoring, it wouldn't hurt him to throw in the occasional jolt of black eyeliner.
9 September 2007
The view from the top floor of 7 World Trade Center was the best backdrop any fashion show has ever had: a crystal-clear panorama of New York at night that was so timeless it could have been yesterday, today, or tomorrow. It was a hard act for the clothes to follow, but, to his credit, John Varvatos produced a collection loaded with character. And he could've used a few more characters to show the clothes on—the sound track of old bluesmen made one hanker for the tough cookies that Yohji Yamamoto dredges up as a complement to his designs. Varvatos treated classic fabrics to imbue them with a previous life, cut them into classic shapes, and styled them up into interesting outfits, but his models didn't always have the seasoning to project the story. That aside, several items—a glossy, fitted ponyskin blazer, a leather-trimmed pinstripe jacket, a washed-wool pea coat—leapt off the catwalk. And the way the designer deconstructs a cliché—offering a tux, say, in gray with a mushroom satin lapel—will always win kudos.The secondary U.S. line with which Varvatos always wraps up his show played out against a backdrop of the Statue of Liberty flashing the peace sign. Perhaps he was dreaming that politically active college boys were the constituency for the preppy/punk hybrid he proposed. In their black wigs, the models were intended to evoke rocker Jesse Malin, whom Varvatos was pushing in his press kit (along with Velvet Revolver). Designer as proselytizing music fan—one more reason for kudos.
4 February 2007
Many other designers are looking to reconstruct menswear, finishing their garments as exquisitely as possible, but John Varvatos took the opposite route for spring. He chose instead to break down not just the structure of his clothes, but also the surface of the fabrics they were made from. Leather was laundered until it shrank, wools were rolled with plaster, knits were washed with coffee for a prestained effect, hems were frayed or torn apart and hand-stitched back together. Figure in the beaten-up accessories (shoes worn sockless, natch), and you had a composite image of a chic hobo, someone not a million miles away from Varvatos's current poster boy, the worn rock-warrior Iggy Pop. But if the dip- and garment-dyeing, the distressing and perforating, offered a master class in the pre-aging of clothes, these calculated imperfections didn't quite add up to the coherent force of Varvatos's fall showing. That said, Varvatos's unerring eye for detail yielded stand-out pieces, like a toggle-closed leather jacket and a snaky black linen suit. And the accessories, however battered, were also strong—bruised but unbowed.For his second line, John Varvatos USA, the rockophile designer dropped last season's college boy in the bowels of Irving Plaza circa '84. There was a New Wave flair to the shiny black suit worn with black-and-white striped rugby shirt and skinny tie, and a foretaste of grunge in the wrecked tees. Nice touch: One guy looked like he'd borrowed his dad's glen-plaid sports jacket.
10 September 2006
Imagine a cross between a French peasant and a refugee from the Russian front, and you have some idea where the John Varvatos man is headed for fall. In sartorial terms, that translated into washed fabrics cut into clothes with a strong military influence. If that sounds somewhat drab, Varvatos's knack for what he calls utilitarian luxury elevated the collection (as did the scale and sophisticated styling of the show itself).A washed leather jacket was croc-stamped, while a trench, also in washed leather, was hand-painted to add a patina of faded luxe. Other fabric treatments included dip-dyeing (on a tweed jacket and poncho) and metal threads woven into the herringbone of a collarless coat. In keeping with the military inspiration, tailoring was highlighted, often in traditional tweeds, and the construction details emphasized (seams were trimmed or exposed). But it was the gutsy outerwear that truly shone, especially a double-breasted officer's coat, a plush number in goatskin, and an epauletted nylon trench in a shade labeled "quagmire" (a veiled reference, perhaps, to the current situation in Iraq).Varvatos tagged a sampling of his Star USA range on the end of the show. It had a college boy attitude, part grunge, part vintage: Think layers of washed leathers and wools, velour sweats, untucked shirts, Converse sneakers. And, priced something like 50 percent cheaper than the signature collection, it should certainly find its audience.
5 February 2006
John Varvatos's spring collection suggested a mood of elegant resignation and decay—as though hard, masculine edges had been washed and worn away by nature. The designer cited a military influence, but one that was soft rather than tough: a camouflage print was sun-bleached into near invisibility on a linen trench or pair of trousers and showed up as the frayed trim on a cotton blouson. The same spirit informed the faded colors and vintage feel of items like a washed leather motorcycle vest, a suede blouson with collegiate-knit cuffs and waistband, and the wide-wale corduroy shoes sported by many of the models—they looked as much like comfy slippers as smart slip-ons. Even a three-piece suit in dark-olive linen had a distinctively vintage edge, thanks to the belted back of the jacket.Varvatos brought the mood back to a more modern, "dressy casual" feel by pairing a shawl-collared tuxedo jacket with white jeans. But the hand-stitching on the silk and linen suit that closed the show was a reminder that the designer is aiming high for a timeless look all his own.
8 September 2005
John Varvatos loves music almost as much as he does fashion, and he successfully integrated his twin passions in his latest collection. He's keen to promote his women's range, so the show opened and closed with sporty yet sophisticated outfits for rock stars' girlfriends, while also hinting at an early seventies time frame. In those heady times, guitarist Jimmy Page took the stage in three-piece suits when Led Zeppelin toured, and his spirit of louche tailoring was the essence of Varvatos' new menswear. Wide-legged trousers were deeply double-pleated, slung low, and cuffed. Jacket shoulders were as broad as the Thin White Duke's in the slightly forties style of that moment in rock dandyism. Shirts were formal, with silk scarves knotted round necks like loose cravats. Shoes—suede wing tips, laced ankle boots— were also dressy, if scuffed. The color scheme embraced ice-blue and burgundy, two tones that could only coexist in the early seventies. A double-breasted tweed coat with a shearling collar had a fuzzy mohair aura that blurred its butchness. As if to underscore the point, Varvatos played "Queen Bitch," Bowie's paean to perverse ambiguity, for his finale.
7 February 2005