Ruffians (Q9081)
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Men’s grooming brand and barbershops
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Ruffians |
Men’s grooming brand and barbershops |
Statements
Ruffian's Brian Wolk and Claude Morais broke form for Spring '15, swapping their New York fashion week time slot for a show in Los Angeles last night. Following a cross-country road trip, the designers set up an L.A. studio earlier this year. The new collection takes design cues from SoCal culture and was sourced and manufactured locally. Citing the "incredible use of visual language in Los Angeles," Wolk called out theater marquees, outdoor advertising, and the city's giant billboards as specific inspirations.Styled by Elizabeth Stewart (known for wardrobing A-listers like Julia Roberts, Cate Blanchett, and Jessica Chastain), the mostly black-and-white offering ranged from sweet schoolgirl looks to leading-lady silhouettes. In that way, it mirrored both the city's famously casual style and its ubiquitous red-carpet culture. Retro fits were softened with delicate accordion and inverted front pleats or given a modern spin with a digital print based on artwork by L.A.-born artist Maynard Monrow. While the city's backdrop proved full of iconic references for the pair, the collection seemed a bit less spirited than in seasons past, missing some of the vivid prints and detailing for which the designers are known.
28 October 2014
Brian Wolk and Claude Morais are at their best when they're taking cues from their Williamsburg circle. Nothing like a bunch of girlfriends to tell you like it is. This season they made the mistake of looking not at their pals, but at the work of Petrus Christus, a portrait painter who was active in Bruges in the 1400s. That's going way back. The flirty printed minidresses of Ruffian's last collection were replaced here by long black dresses as somber as monks' robes, accessorized by stiff white ruffs that heightened their costumey aspects. Fortunately, it wasn't all quite that dour. Luminous color combinations—cardinal red with Wedgwood blue, chartreuse and blush pink—lifted things up, as did a unicorn tapestry print. You could see one of their Brooklyn girls in their drawstring-waist digital-print pants (the same print as the unicorns, only zoomed in 400 times). But overall their fabrics tended to have a stiffness that didn't do the formality of their silhouettes any favors. After their youthful Spring outing, this felt like a comedown.
7 February 2014
When Ruffian was born about a decade ago, designers Brian Wolk and Claude Morais were going after an upper-crusty lady-who-lunches type. As they've grown up, they've rejiggered things, and now they have that matron's granddaughters in their sights. Their new Spring collection was their youngest in spirit yet. Devoid of all the accessories that weighed down their Fall show, it looked particularly fresh.Françoise Sagan's novelBonjour Tristesseand the Jean Seberg movie that was based on it were their starting points (Claude is French Canadian, so they love a Gallic reference). Saint-Tropez in the fifties came through in the adorable leather-fringed, polka-dotted flats the models wore. A new collaboration with Allagiulia, the shoes will be a hit with Ruffian customers. So will the almost-but-not-quite-prim blouses in pretty French cotton floral and the exceedingly well-cut ankle-cropped pants in jewel-toned cotton silk. A shift in black-and-white bouclé with rubber-coated vulcanized canvas insets could go either way: good girl or bad.Tristesse's Cecile, as anyone who saw the film knows, was something of a hellion, so there was more spice than sugar in this lineup. A silk and cotton pantsuit in sea green looked striking and well constructed, but it's the rubberized cotton biker jackets (like leather, but a lot less expensive!) that are going to speak to the Ruffian girl.
6 September 2013
Brian Wolk and Claude Morais are dreamers with a business bent. This season, for instance, they introduced a shoe collab with The Frye Company, their eyewear is by the über-hip old-school Moscot, and they didn't forget to Instagram the Foco coconut waters on each front-row seat. As for the dream, they called their new show Reverie, and for inspiration revisited the Bowery of the nineteenth century, when it was lined with opium dens and theaters, not contemporary art galleries, haute pizzerias, and a vibe-destroying 7-Eleven.Their romantic imaginings have sometimes tended to freeze their clothes in the past, but last season they smartly looked to their native Williamsburg for a creative spark, and their clothes seemed newly connected to the here and now. The collection landed them a dozen new retail accounts.Crossing the East River produced slightly more mixed results, but that's mostly due to all those accessories partnerships. The caps and tassels and round wire eye frames weren't necessary when a silk printed with a Coromandel-screen motif efficiently relayed their message about Chinoiserie. Those excesses aside, there were smart pieces here: a purple chalk-stripe pantsuit; a metallic bouclé zip-front coat; a fitted peplum jacket in a floral jacquard; and cropped, flared pants in the same gorgeous fabric. Wolk and Morais have an abiding interest and a real eye for traditional couture materials. Here's a business proposition for them: a side consulting gig in which they share their expertise in fabric development with other labels.
8 February 2013
Since they got their start almost a decade ago, Brian Wolk and Claude Morais have always set their sights high, designing for the upper crust. For Spring, they tried something different, taking inspiration from—and aiming at—the Williamsburg neighborhood where they live. The results were one part Madame de Pompadour and another part Brooklyn hipster. "Baroque in the street" is what the duo called it backstage.The French court feeling came courtesy of brocades in sugar-almond pastels and a clever toile de Jouy they created in collaboration with the artist John Gordon Gauld that depicts not Versailles' gardens but Bedford Street storefronts and the B-burg Bridge. The low part of the high-low mix came through in the way the clothes were styled. We're not talking Lena Dunham-in-Girlsdisheveled, but there was a studied irreverence to all the layering. Take the shirtdress worn unbuttoned underneath a ticking-stripe corset top, and the T-shirt so oversize it was almost a dress that slouched sexily off one shoulder. Or the overalls: With those, Wolk and Morais tapped into one of the season's surprise front-row trends. And don't forget the models' colorful Converse low-tops.We'd call the overall look "chicks who tweet" more than "ladies who lunch." If that proves disorienting to Ruffian's longtime supporters, a rifle through the showroom racks will reveal a neat and trim pair of white jacquard pants and scads of bow-front blouses, among other uptown crowd-pleasers.
7 September 2012
Last season it was Saratoga Springs. For Fall, Brian Wolk and Claude Morais visited a different kind of horse country: the English countryside. For a second, we could've sworn we were inDownton Abbey, what with one model's long, narrow skirt in black wool flannel, matching smoking jacket, and frilly white blouse. But the impression didn't last long. Chalk that up to her thoroughly modern purple velvet manicure; those nails are going to drive the beauty bloggers wild.There was a lot to like about the clothes here, too. Two parallel rows of black buttons down the back of a blue-gray wool melton chesterfield made it a coat to remember. On the sportier side, an olive green wool twill field coat with leather shoulders had an appealing A-line swing. And a hunting jacket in glen plaid with patch pockets in a contrasting check was a reminder that the Ruffian boys are snappy tailors. The feminine side of their formula wasn't as fully realized. A stretch velvet dress, for instance, felt out of step with the rest of the collection, but there was on-message charm in a cameo pink blouse with white lace collar and cuffs.
10 February 2012
Brian Wolk and Claude Morais spent a good portion of the summer in Saratoga Springs. Horse country. They found inspiration in jockey jerseys, applying the graphic color blocking to their signature prim and trim tailoring as well as to a debut line of swimwear. The tank suits, spliced diagonally across the torso in green and royal blue or shocking pink and red, were the best thing about their Spring lineup—straightforwardly sporty. A long dress, though it was in yellow and blue chiffon, also captured that cool, effortless feel.Elevating sports gear into something chic is shaping up as one of this week's big ideas, but the tricky thing about this duo's thoroughbred theme is that exercise isn't really the Ruffian boys' thing. Thick black and white striped sleeves didn't look like they belonged on a dainty fuchsia silk shirtdress. More than likely, their ladylike clients would prefer the dress in solid pink. A short polo dress in black-piped white terrycloth was a lot more believable, but all in all, this time around the designers were a shade too literal with their chosen theme.
9 September 2011
The tuxedo, believe it or not, used to be considered semiformal attire—something men wore to dinner at home or at their club. A lot has changed in the 100-plus years since Edward VII popularized the tail-less jacket. Yves Saint Laurent famously put a woman in a tux—he called it Le Smoking—way back in 1966. Ruffian's Tuxedo Park collection inevitably brought YSL to mind. It's hard to measure up to a master like that, but the show found designers Brian Wolk and Claude Morais playing to one of their strengths: tweaking menswear codes for the ladies. Their version of the smoking came as a cropped black patent jacket, with an ivory silk charmeuse blouse tucked into a high-waisted satin toreador pant. Elongated blazers in a chevron texture that could double as dresses looked sharp, as did the oversize Prince of Wales check on a trim skirtsuit. And the way the designers turned a bib-front shirt into a panne velvet shirtdress was clever.On the other side of the equation, Wolk and Morais showed a short cocktail dress with lace insets on either side of the torso and a ruff of frills at the neckline and shoulders. Absolutely nothing androgynous about that, or the little number dripping with silk fringe below the hips. The eighties-era socialite Gloria von Thurn und Taxis was an influence on the collection (note the models' pompadours), so the feminine elements, especially an ivory silk ruffle coat, were decidedlyde trop. Much more appealing was the elegantly understated long-sleeve black sequin gown that closed the show.
10 February 2011
Leave obvious inspirations like Bianca Jagger or Ali MacGraw to other designers. Brian Wolk and Claude Morais took Susan Travers, an obscure diplomat, according to the press notes, and the only woman to serve officially with the French Foreign Legion, as a muse for Spring. She provided the collection with its polished military look—brass-buttoned ambassador jackets cinched with satin belts over high-waisted, full-legged canvas trousers and satin camp shirts tucked into crisp A-line skirts. The white, royal blue, olive drab, and gold palette was razor-sharp, but Ruffian's lineup wasn't as regimented as all that. Travers' position took her not only through Europe but to Africa and Vietnam as well, which gave the designers a good reason to mix in an ikat-patterned strapless dress with an intricately pleated bodice and another summery frock with pintucking at the waist in white cotton sateen. Leopard print and black sequin-embroidered camouflage added an exotic element, too, the former more believably than the latter. Wolk and Morais have always loved mixing the masculine with the feminine. But with so much tailoring on the runways lately, it was their straight-up-sexy dresses draped to a twist at the waist that had real gotta-get-one appeal.
8 September 2010
Space is the place for Ruffian this season. Antique constellation prints and images of Orion taken by the Hubble telescope decorated the designers' silk blouses, and skirtsuits with trim, cropped jackets and flaring, to-the-knee skirts were cut in silvery bouclé inspired by Vincent van Gogh's masterpieceThe Starry Night. These, along with a strong lineup of outerwear—a pair of elegant, narrow capes with curving armholes and a perky navy peacoat with a leather collar and belt were standouts—will please the tony, upper-crust part of Brian Wolk and Claude Morais' clientele.Lately, though, having befriended Marc Jacobs and Lorenzo Martone (the latter of whom is hosting a big after-party for them at the Box), the duo has been running with a clubby crowd. So there was something of a disco eighties vibe to stretch jersey dresses inset with sequins of crescent moons and mohair sweatshirts worn with high-waisted, shimmery silk moiré leggings.It made for a bit of a mixed message, but in this case, that's not necessarily a criticism. A little something for the ladies who lunch, and some more for the ladies who party-hop, just might be the smartest way to build the Ruffian brand.
11 February 2010