Oliver Spencer (Q8820)
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Oliver Spencer is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Oliver Spencer |
Oliver Spencer is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
Held in an amenable Shoreditch drinking hole–meets–food court featuring fine fried chicken and pizza, this show was kind of transformed into a Hong Kong night market via the addition of some suspended scarlet paper lanterns and dragons. The agenda was to service Spencer’s claim that this collection was an homage to Wong Kar-wai’sIn the Mood for Love.In truth, there was neither a scintilla of the four-way equation of romantic agony squared by ecstasy of that movie, nor any especially discernibly Asian elements here—except perhaps for the blended cultures behind the collarless Mao/Nehru-style jacket that Spencer has long successfully pitched as an “Artist” jacket. Instead, Spencer was being Spencer, which means carefully casual semi-tailoring for men—of which there are a great many—who dwell in a space between the fully formal and the utterly elasticated. Mature casualwear highlights included sash-belted field jackets, striped jersey polos,coquille-print shirts and shorts, and deconstructed tailoring in madras check cotton and plain drill. The most radical offerings here were the color stories in teal and burned orange and the occasional insertion of a semi-tailored bomber. That, though, was to the good—Spencer has mastered his formula, and to throw it away for the illusion of progress to the detriment of depth would be a false economy. These were great clothes for those of the Spencer persuasion.
9 June 2019
In a very classy move, Oliver Spencer’s notes stated: “We’d like to dedicate this show to a gentleman whose warmth and creativity have been an inspiration to so many of us: Mr. Joe Casely-Hayford.” This was just one display of Spencer’s broader classiness; others included a great new venue in the lecture hall of the Royal Academy of Arts and the sincere but not in-your-face consideration of sustainability that ran throughout the collection.The theme was Alpinism, but it was one lightly trodden: a green velvet casual suit with climbing rope piping, the vaguely Nordic pattern on a two-zip knit jacket, and the rope-laced shoes were about as yodelayheehoo!/fondue as it got. More broadly, the mountain theme was meant to complement and inform Spencer’s ongoing commitment to producing his garments and accessories in sustainable materials. The standout of those fabrics was a wool featuring wide crimped ridges about the same size as jumbo wale corduroy; in blue or gray this “wool seersucker,” as Spencer called it, was cut into a great trouser shape (tapered with a square panel at the knee, ski pass below the left hip, and cuffed with a popper at the hem) and matched with a version of the four-pocket collarless jacket he does so very well. Along with bombers in velvet or micro-cord teamed with similarly proportioned pants, these made for an excellently proportioned semiformal option. Spencer is a master negotiator of one of the hardest territories in menswear to scale: the middle ground. If that sounds backhanded, it isn’t. Because consistently achieving and then refining the harmony, sensibility, and proportion evident in this collection is very tricky indeed.
7 January 2019
Going to parlay with Oliver Spencer postshow was impossible this afternoon and that was all my fault. Under-16-year-olds are not allowed backstage at London Fashion Week Men’s and I was in the company of two them: my 9- and 12-year-old sons.Bringing your kids to work can be perilous in fashion (I’ve seen some terrible kids-at-shows scenarios—babes-in-arms by speaker stacks, et cetera) but Spencer proved to be a fine designer to expose mine to for their first runway experience. His casting is diverse in terms of ethnicity, age, and, to a degree, size. A background film shot by Wolfgang Buttress of a prettily poppy-peppered meadow—the better to emphasize the sustainable sourcing of much of the fabrics on show—was pleasingly gentle. The vision of man Spencer presents is mellow and confidently soft, both in his shoulders and his politics.This being Spencer, neither the clothes nor the styling—obligatory boilersuit or jacket with shorts apart—were that out-there. They just looked very appealing. His revere-less “artist” and “photographer” jackets and pared-down field jacket/shackets are among the best of their type. His soft suiting—eminently separable for mix-or-matching—is formal only via its lineage. There was lots of linen and seersucker, the subject of gentle and successful experimentation in styles with which they are not typically associated.Preshow, the 12-year-old had discussed the finer points of Blue Steel and Magnum with the charming Simon Doonan, while the 9-year-old considered the environmental advantages of linen as written on the back of a packet of flaxseeds in Spencer’s goodie bag. Postshow their consensus on the collection was “fancy but casual”—pretty on-the-money.
9 June 2018
Oliver Spencer draws a parallel between now and the 1970s: “In recessions, people start to dress up more.” That’s certainly true of the clubbing, gender-fluid, diverse audience which throngs London men’s Fashion Week; but for men of Spencer’s generation, a passing nod to the glory days of Bryan Ferry’s ’70s dandyism is enough to push the nostalgia buttons. With “Love Is the Drug” on repeat on the soundtrack, there were ’70s signifiers on the runway, perhaps only detectible if you’d been prewarned: sailor caps at rakish angles, corduroy, velvet, a faint echo of the nipped-torso tailoring Antony Price has been sculpting for Ferry all these years.More to the point, really, is Spencer’s accessible, contemporary reading of where fashion is for the large constituency which exists beyond London clubland. “It’s really about a cross section of what my customer likes: bomber and safari jackets, peacoats, tailoring,” he said. “Whether they’re 25 or 85, I appreciate them.” He included women in that; this season Daisy Lowe, Jade Parfitt, and Catherine Hayward ofEsquiremagazine all walked the show. “Well, I thought it’s about time I said hello to women!” he laughed. “I’m not making women’s clothes, but women come in and buy, and I wanted to salute them.”
6 January 2018
It takes a lot to get a mainstream Englishman to indicate that he might be a little irritated with the way things are going. Against that cultural constraint, the T-shirts the guys were wearing when they shed their jackets at Oliver Spencer were a fully emotional outburst.LOVE TOWNthey read, in large black letters on white.The horrific terrorist attack of last Saturday night on people who were walking over London Bridge and enjoying an evening at bars and restaurants is certainly behind the general London impulse to cry out about the things people value about the capital. For Oliver Spencer, a London entrepreneur, the pride and sorrow is mixed with generalized anger. “My clothes aren’t political, but enough is enough, with the way politicians and landlords have been behaving lately.” He, like everyone else who does business in London, feels the impact of escalating rents and worries about the detrimental effects on people who shop for his clothes.His collection, as ever, is a snapshot of the diverse normality of a metropolitan street—guys of many ages and ethnicities in checked seersucker shorts and shirts, linen trousers with rolled hems, zipped jackets and lightweight parkas. It’s no diss to Spencer that his clothes are a kind of how-to index of smart modern dressing for the regular working guy—say, the one who wants to display some cool fashionability but not of the kind that gets a man stared at in the street. Completely Brit values then, proudly upheld in the face of adversity.
10 June 2017
An Englishman striding to work with a rolled umbrella—a funny old national stereotype Oliver Spencer toyed with yesterday. Of course, it’s really as outdated as the bowler hat, as is the idea that all British gents wear pinstripes and go to work in the City. Spencer has been adept at breaking down the rules of daily dressing for a normal kind of chap since he started his business in 2002, and now he is established as a bona fide established British brand. Today, he presented clothes for a broad church of blokes who really did reflect a smart representation of what London masculinity looks like in 2017, to whit: racially diverse and—just for a change—ranging from skinny teens all the way up to cool dads.Rei Kawakubo might have been the first to bring a cast of friends and interesting characters to a runway, in the ’80s, but as with women’s shows, it still feels absurdly unusual to see middle-aged men—surely in reality the earners of the world—walking a collection. It gave Spencer’s show a touch of believable gravitas as he dealt out his cross-generational take on gray windowpane checks and charcoal chalk-stripes, velvet and leather bomber jackets, and black watch tartan parkas.Spencer gets the proportions of pants right—relaxed, with a turn-up, not too trendy as to strike as embarrassing on a man of a sensible age. And, with the exception of the opening shirt-and-tie look, the suggestion throughout of crewnecks and mock turtles as a new-normal under-jacket option should play well with the more senior end of Spencer’s constituency. In fact, when it came down to it, his reinvention of the male twinset, some knitted up in bold, slouchy zigzags, looked way better on the older man than it did on the pale youth. For once, the granddad cardigan may not turn out to be such an insulting Christmas gift next winter.
8 January 2017
In this time of seasonal shifts and climactic uncertainties, it pays to check the ankle if you’re trying to pin down what collection is being showcased during London’s menswear collections. Socks spell Fall, a nude ankle Spring. Of course, an exposed tibia is par for the course down Milan way—but in England, they’re rarely bared bar the warmer months, especially when their indication on a runway is implicit.There wasn’t a single set of hosiery inOliver Spencer’s Spring 2017 show. Why? Because his naked ankles were doing double duty, alluding not only to Spring but to the Med. Spencer cited Capri as his inspiration—not the pant (thank heaven for small mercies, this being menswear, after all), but the island. Specifically the Casa Malaparte, a masterpiece of Italian modernist architecture built on a southeastern peninsula. It was the backdrop for much of Godard’sLe Mépris.What does that add up to? Bare feet in brogues, sure, and a lot of easily cut, softly tailored, and lightweight summer clothes. Spencer cited the ’50s as an influence—although Casa Malaparte was conceived in the ’30s, and Godard didn’t get his hands on it until the ’60s. Nevertheless, the ’50s surrendered stylishly wide-cut suits in Aegean blue, ocher, or terracotta red, mixed with classic Madras checks and stubby linens, occasionally with a random top-stitch detail. It all managed the double duty of retro-leaning and seeming contemporary for today, for the wardrobe of a modern man.The natural question is, which modern man, precisely? Oliver Spencer’s men aren’t slavish followers of fashion, or even especially dedicated. Next to the city’s young guns, his clothes can seem staid—Dad-like even. That’s not necessarily a bad thing—London fashion should be for every man, and indeed for the everyman. And if many of them would balk at the progressive but unwearable offerings of London’s bright young things, they’ll be drawn to Spencer’s quiet wearability. Perhaps these clothes don’t warrant the attention nor the pressure a runway showcase demands of them, and equally aren’t presented to their best advantage there. But when Spencer ignores those restrictions and goes with his gut—as today—there’s a palpable commercial appeal, even to hard-nosed fans of the avant-garde.
10 June 2016
It’s fascinating to observe firsthand the trickle-down effect in fashion. This time last year,J.W.Anderson’s slit ankle flares and chocolate box of browns from milk to bittersweet signified a high-concept high fashion re-embracing of the ’70s for Fall 2015. How so many sniggered. Yet come Fall 2016,Oliver Spenceroffers the same and nary an eyebrow raises.Spencer’s inspiration was rock: Ginger Baker, the founder of Cream and drummer for Blind Faith, who wound up immersing himself in the world of Afrobeat. I didn’t get that, but I did get that Spencer’s ’70s redux checked every box: the peat bog palette, a knitted tank top, rusty corduroys and velours, patched suedes, a dangling Doctor Who humbug-stripe scarf. Check, check, check.Spencer is a pragmatist at heart: He lasted only six months in art school before breaking out on his own to hawk wares on a Portobello Market stall. Hence the fact that his ’70s was easily digested, palatable to the everyman—the diverse casting, of all colors and creeds, multiple ages, and even different heights (a fair few of Spencer’s models were under 6 feet, and many had beards tinged with gray) reflect that broad customer base. They also provide what some would term brief respite, others calculated distraction, from the homogeneity of gangly schoolboys marching like automata up and down runways across five cities over the next few weeks. Because here you wound up focusing more on the men than, perhaps, the clothes.But again, we’re back to reality, and it felt like these were clothes men will really wear. Maybe men who aren’t slaves to fashion, or the incessant street style pap snaps that shutterbug outside the weeks’ key venues. Or men who just like brown. There’s a decided market for these kinds of clothes—but one questions if, really, a fashion show is doing Oliver Spencer any favors. I’m sure there were neat details in his collection, in the finishing of the tweedy jackets and slim coats in faux astrakhan, velvet, or that super ’70s cord, but this runway often swamped them.
9 January 2016
Oliver Spencer says he always starts with an artist in mind when he's designing a new collection. Lucian Freud was the first. For Spring 2016, Spencer claimed as an influence the minimal monumentalist Richard Serra, he of the gigantic contoured curves of rusting sheet metal. Dynamic, exciting work to be sure, but a tricky correlative for a designer working in the flimsy medium of fabric. Which meant the Serra inspiration was abstract to the point of nonexistence. Except that Spencer insisted you could see it in the clean, straight lines of his clothes, in the clashing textures, in the checks, and—who knows?—in the rusty shade of a suede jacket.Whatever. Without the substance of Serra, Spencer's clothes still stood as an appealingly low-maintenance summer collection for guys of a smart/casual stripe. Tailoring was unlined; shirttails were flying; utilitarian linens would need no pressing. Spencer talked about a clash of textures, but it was scarcely anything that would scare the horses. He said his ideal is always dressing for the Nigerian embassy. If that means something that was sharp enough to pass diplomatic muster in 120-degree heat, he met his own challenge. Making the whole package more attractive was one of the broadest, quirkiest model castings of the whole weekend, and a live soundtrack provided by Q Strings, a female quartet whose plangent version of "Love Will Tear Us Apart" was enough to bring a tear to the eye.
13 June 2015