Ports 1961 (Q7334)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Canadian luxury fashion house
- Ports International
- Ports
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Ports 1961 |
Canadian luxury fashion house |
|
Statements
This season’s Ports 1961 collection, designed and shot in the label’s Milan headquarters, represents a new beginning. Karl Templer in no longer creative director, even though he contributed to the styling ideas. The team has been renewed with a very clear objective: making the DNA of the brand resurface, starting from the founder, the Japanese-Canadian entrepreneur Luke Tanabe.This was achieved by recreating the silhouettes used by Tanabe in the early ’60s. He was one of the first people to import collections styled and made in the West into China—clothes with dry silhouettes, with a sober aesthetic and a strong practical quality. Today’s collection followed suit: the coats, knitwear and cotton trousers were all straight and not oversized. Same goes for the shirts. The only evening gown was straight and flowing, with thermo adhesive strass applied.The aim was to create a wardrobe of classic pieces, made more current through small and large details. There was a tailleur, but in a structured yet soft material, with visible topstitching. The coats were all double (pockets included): one side leather, the other shearling. The denim was conventional in design, but original in the manufacturing. It is called “spray denim” and uses a white denim with sewn on faux pockets and buttons, which is then sprayed with Blue Ports paint. The resulting effect, with the substitute details, is a saturated jean with strong contrasts. A vintage feel pervaded all the looks, including the viscose rompers and the knitwear with various textures, from bouclé to bubble.Then, the metal spheres. Present on zips, jewels and belt buckles, they called back to the original logo of Ports 1961. The globe is a symbol of the experiment of international storytelling through clothes.
16 June 2023
There were no celebrities, no influencers—indeed no contrived hype of any kind—on the sidelines of this first-slot-of-the-day, out-of-town show for Ports 1961. Instead of bulking up his morning dose of fashion with the filler froth of fame, Karl Templer delivered it straight up, espresso style.“The idea is about taking immediate, symbolic codes—often from menswear—that are often quite two-dimensional and then adding an extra third dimension,” he said backstage. “It’s very pure, very ‘wardrobe,’ and very simple in some ways.”Delivering highly recognizable, apparent simplicity with an upon-closer-inspection twist of difference that motivates consumption is a tried-and-tested formula: Templer followed it interestingly today. Wardrobe “essentials” flavored with difference included double-hemmed and lapeled black tailoring, a long dress in black or ivory with a toggle-fastened seam that curved upward from right ankle to left hip to allow for multiple degrees of display, and cable-knit sweaters that disintegrated at the hem into knit fringe.Classic gingham and scarf prints were exploded into intrecciato-meets-paper-weave construction, while fine-gauge knits were disassembled and reassembled into a fresh patchwork of the recognizable: the twinset. Templer took last-century masculine codes like the trench coat or pinstripe and then worked in opaque paneling or adjusted the angle of symmetry in order to add sensuality. V-neck sweaters and ponchos came edged in grosgrain, cricket-style stripes that fluttered down beyond the hems of their garments to create more 3D texture. Stripes both wide and narrow were crowded into silk shirting and shirtdresses to upend and refresh ancient Jermyn Street codes. Like the apparently simple facet-cut bracelets and pendants that accessorized this collection, these were clothes that looked straightforwardly chic at first sight, then demanded a second look.
24 September 2022
During his creative captaincy of Ports 1961, Karl Templer has developed an effective fashion formula. This latest voyage represented another variation of its interplay between ease and intricacy in order to stimulate desire.The starting point was to present pieces that upon the visual horizon at first appear familiar: classic (albeit slightly volumized) silhouettes were delivered by shirt-dresses, knitwear, parkas, and so on. Upon further, slightly closer inspection a loose maritime theme suggested itself via the sailor-fronted denim, the navy blazers, and a Breton stripe cameo. The argyle crisscross and a classic-looking aran knit were also visible upon approach.It was only when quite close to these Ports pieces that their intricacies became apparent; the argyle effect was achieved with satin ribbons, the aran sweater was longer at the sleeve and high on the waist, the tailoring was split and slightly deconstructed, and the striping was distorted. Parkas featured pearlescent fastenings and studs, shirt dresses were edged with scalloping. Delicately complicated arrangements of pleat, print, and lace further semaphored the gentle swirl of clothing currents Templer was steering his customer into.“I want it to be a combination of things that are very familiar in your subconscious, put together in an easy way, but when you look at each of them they are very special,” said Templer. He added that he had worked this season especially to achieve an out-of-time effect, as if the pieces had been rediscovered after long storage rather than freshly purchased. “Everything comes from something that is semi-authentic, and then it is manipulated again,” he said. This Ports collection offered further safe harbor for those seeking pieces that are easy to wear but far trickier to place.
19 July 2022
“It’s really about this new self-expression and the rejection of traditional codes of dress,” said Karl Templer at Ports 1961 this morning. “Younger people now, they see things through different filters and it adds up to a new way of dressing.” We’ve been hearing a lot about these young people this season. They’re driving the shift toward shorter lengths and corset dressing. Templer addressed both in his new collection, styling them the way the kids do. Take the collection’s opening look—the fitted jacket leaned Victorian but the car wash mini would’ve sent those Victorians to the fainting couch. Add lace-up platform boots and you have the vibe of the moment: a look-at-me irreverence.As sensitive as Templer is to changing trends, Ports 1961 is a wardrobing collection, a resource for an ace sweater or a statement coat. The former took the shape of graphic marinière knits with fringes (the dress version was especially cool) and Arans built up with undulations of ruffles. Templer gave puffer jackets a boost with frogging closures, and a duffle coat some verve with curly shearling sleeves and lining. And because the target demographic is global young people, there were quite a few party dresses. The two in particular that synthesized the playful spirit Templer was aiming for layered lace teddy slips with sequined busts over understated ribbed knits.
26 February 2022
“It was about an immediacy really,” said Karl Templer of this Ports 1961 pre-fall collection: “They’re archetype pieces in a way but then, when you take a second glance and you study them carefully, you observe that there’s a lot of craftsmanship gone into each piece.” Templer worked to offer his customers the fundamentally familiar spiked with a tantalizing jolt of the unfamiliar—remixed through design and ingenious craft just enough to trigger that consumer-Pavlovian salivation for newness.Prime examples here included biker jackets grafted into herringbone wool to create hybrid zip-up minidresses, and a luxury utilitarian blouson and parka imprinted with the ribcage fossils of military frogging. Eco-cashmere was shaped into dresses and slips punctuated with panels of cable-knit and horizontal stripes of silk chiffon tufting. Wide woven white cashmere stitching provided contrast on slick black leather shirting and minidresses. A loosely tailored blue pinstripe suit, archetype 101, was degenericized by slicing into the sleeves. That slip-dress silhouette returned in expanded volume thanks to a faux fur fabrication.Foil to that outline were the riding boots and Chelsea boots with chains that underpinned Templer’s structures. This was a precisely focused collection that delivered arrestingly developed variations on can’t-go-wrong favorites.
26 January 2022
As a stylist, Karl Templer has long been extremely successful. As a designer, here at Ports 1961, he had until today pumped out a series of fine, super-bourgeois collections that were artfully fashioned and deeply thought through, but not necessarily the stuff of dreams. This morning, though, he shifted in a new direction that seemed like a fiery and fresh ignition.Templer said he had been influenced by the idea of a “post-phone” sensibility: lovers of clothes who were framing their wearables for the signature piece rather than the full look. This starting point tilted him to a younger place that was still rooted in his deep knowledge of the codes of clothes. Graffiti-printed dresses and reliefed knitwear, deconstructed biker dresses and shirts, python accented pleats, T-shirt dresses, and double-layered perforated leather skirts and dresses were a few of the subjects of his refreshed brush. On the podium there were grommet-soled, stacked boots that in turn spoke to his gleaming hardware language for the brand—not exactly new, but specifically articulated.It all added up to a Ports collection you could see activating the acquisitional energies of a demographic it has not previously stimulated. This was a punch-in-the-guts good collection that surprisingly and efficiently promoted Ports into a new league of relevance. Fashion is crying out for new ideas, and here we saw some. Even better, they were good.
26 September 2021
Tough and tender, silk and steel: This Ports 1961 resort collection saw Karl Templer apply his mixologist’s eye to concoct a rigorously contrasting cocktail of wearable ingredients. The fundamental dichotomy was feminine-masculine, and these elements were shaped to complement rather than oppose—so a blush cropped biker, or a handsomely gathered cotton dress cut to substitute the shoulder for décolletage, or men’s shirting cut and remixed with lace insertions.Successfully continued motifs included ribbon-laced rib knits, topcoats with buttoned paneling, that emphasis on shirting, and an inclination to create fresh layers of façade over the established. New directions included a souvenir jacket reworked as a minidress and a punchy duo of georgette floral mid-lengthers punctuated by grommeted belts at the end.Templer said: “This duality, and a little bit of a mod influence, is there. But it’s still a wardrobe, and it’s very much not a concept collection. I wanted to take the familiar and make it ever-so-slightly unfamiliar but in a light way.” Eminently throw-on-able but also interestingly twisted, this particular Ports cocktail slipped down just fine.
7 July 2021
Karl Templer played accentuated contour against accentuated texture for this 60th-anniversary (the clue’s in the name) Ports 1961 collection. The contours lived within a consistent silhouette and were delineated by decoratively exaggerated details, including wide turtlenecks, generous collars on overcoats and cropped bikers, and amplified storm flaps on outerwear. There were further lines of layer and fold on sarong skirts in leather or thick knit and fabric that sometimes symmetrically echoed gathering in the garments above.Much of the texture came courtesy of a technically impressive array of knitwear that saw thick tubes of leather braided against wool and abstract reefs of differently toned tufting fixed on ribbed beds. Faux-fur details on those accentuated collars represented further tactile texture; meanwhile the texture in a tight series of pieces in a naive woodcut doodle jacquard were visual, as were the blurred outlines on a “distorted Bettie Page” graphic.Both very dressed and faintly primal—some of the looks resembled blankets styled elaborately in the spirit of 1950s couture—the collection came peppered with aesthetic complications, including cantilevered midsole heels and winding twists of fastening up the inner sleeves of shirting. The heavily French codes of bourgeois dressing that Templer had set out to renew in previous collections remained, but were reduced in order to accommodate his fresher emphasis on that fundamental interplay of contour and texture. This was a carefully thought through and immaculately rendered fashion equation whose results should offer anniversary-year Ports 1961 customers some new and stimulating strategies for self-expression in dressing come fall.
1 March 2021
The hypebae–meets–vestal virgin sandals of twisted grosgrain, the Romanesque pteruges dresses of fabric strips, and the drapily layered off-the-shoulder goddess dresses near the end all suggested antiquity as an inspiration. However, Karl Templer insisted temple attire was not on his mind as he put together this Ports 1961 collection.“It was all about touch, at first,” he said. “At the moment, touch is forbidden, and you see everything through a computer. So the idea was of something that embraces you, the idea that people can still find pleasure in dressing up for themselves personally.”Many of these clothes did look a pleasure to wear, particularly down the sunny alfresco runway, with ample room for distancing, upon which Ports presented. Templer is still pursuing his modernized vision of classic bourgeois dressing, but here he offered a softened summer version that contained much metaphorical masking in double-layered garments, including suiting; the opening dresses with Aubrey Beardsley–esque illustrations of embrace; a double-hemmed blue silk naval buttoned trench; and more. Sweaters of twisted knit on opaque panels and two meshed dresses of laser-cut technical silk were emblematic of airiness and free movement. Tricksily articulated wrap dresses and knit dresses in overlapping fan-shaped panels were conversely suggestive of insulation and security. Sleeves on long washed-cotton shirtdresses as well as light trenches featured nearly-to-the-elbow buttons to allow the wearer to tweak her levels of arm exposure.This collection could have done perhaps with a wider exploration of color—it was all off-whites played against inky navy or black, with only the odd sortie of red or yellow. But that’s just a quibble: At Ports, Templer is using his expert knowledge of the classical codes of womenswear as the foundation upon which to build an increasingly fresh yet sophisticated interpretation.
26 September 2020
“It was based on the idea that if you walk down Bond Street in London, or Via Della Spiga in Milan, or Rue Saint-Honoré in Paris, you might see these beautiful women, or characters of style. And [what] you’re feeling is that they are really put together, but that there is also something a little bit challenging.” What Karl Templer was getting at here was that this was a bourgeois lady dressing with a twist. That is no fresh concept, but here the twist was as carefully considered as the pussy-bowed scarfs knotted around each model’s neck.The pieces in this collection were often classic on first glance, second glance less so. The square-toed boots were slouchily wide and sometimes featured a double-take addition in the raised outline of a slingback sandal. The large-buttoned, frogging-fronted black and navy outerwear, also later in Prince of Wales check, flared out south of the waist to create a kicky and attractively unusual silhouette. Asymmetric Aran knit dresses and irregularly printed white-on-black silk windowpane check dresses were patterned and textured to brushstroke ergonomically across the form within. Shirred-midriff full-length dresses mixed patches of plain and floral fabric, and foulard dresses counterpointed multi-sized polka dots. The deconstructed houndstooth check-knit throws and coats and car-wash-pleated skirt under a Breton sweater ticked two highly present boxes in the collections this season.Dresses and a trench coat featuring hand-drawn illustrations of finely coiffed women were perhaps a figurative personification of the women Templer was imagining in these garments. He all but closed this show with some adroitly made and deeply tailored looks in charcoal wool, before calling time on his highly cultivated luxury passeggiata with Kaia Gerber in a billowing white-piped wrap dress and those slouchy look-twice boots.
23 February 2020