THE CLASS OF 2016: NEW DESIGNERS, PART ONE

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A close look at some of the season’s sharpest new faces dressed in the latest collections from four rising designers, including the youngest ever nominee for the LVMH Prize. Take a look at four more new designs in the second part of this portfolio here.

KOZABURO

Over the past few years, Tokyo-born Kozaburo Akasaka has made his way from Japan to London’s Central Saint Martins College to America’s fashion capital. After spending some time working for design houses in New York, he realized his ambition of continuing to develop his personal æsthetic and enrolled in Parsons’s MFA program for fashion design, from which he will graduate this year. Heavily influenced by Japan’s music scene and street style from his Nineties youth, Akasaka combines his tailoring education with his inspirational interests to create unique, contemporary menswear with foundations in timeless design.

A vinyl record from Eighties British post-punk band the Durutti Column inspired Akasaka’s vision for his graduate collection. The sleeve of the LP, cut from coarse sandpaper, was made with the intention of scratching any other records stacked next to it. His heavily patched pants with swatches of varying denim hues overlapping each other’s frayed edges appear sharp to the touch. A wool coat treated to rust and rupture its surface bears a textural finish. A jacket made of sandpaper itself is embellished with rivets and bolts for additional edge. But, to ease worry for the wearer, each piece is lined with the softest, recycled cotton for a final contradictory effect.

ARIES

Sofia Maria Prantera and Fergus Purcell founded Aries to reconcile a pang of nostalgia for Eighties street fashion, when style could directly reflect the values and musical influences of any subculture. For Prantera, creator of celebrated Nineties streetwear brand Silas, a void needed to be filled with beautifully made women’s clothing that still upheld the voice of anti-fashion movements like those of her youth, without the commercialism. Partnered with Purcell, famed for designing the Palace Skateboards logo and whom she’s known since their days together at Slam City Skates, the pair has created capsule collections since Spring 2013 of hand-dyed, hand-painted pieces, reusing cutoffs of scrap leather and leftover fabrics to patch denim and experiment against conventional rules of patterns. Among the tie-dye and tears are sophisticated silhouettes and mature materials of Italian make, graffitied with original graphics that imbue Aries with an irony and indefinable quality.

The Spring 2016 collection continues in the same vein, with strength in appealing patched pieces that colorblock reconstructed denim along with delicate sheers. Accessorized by knee-length fringed necklines, tattered tees, and leopard-embellished leathers in boxy shapes, femininity is still afforded to the tough girl.

VEJAS

“The morality of plump skin and healthy bodies, the uniformity of laid-back stances, and lips that redundantly pronounce individual lifestyle preferences” are the determined and aspirational words on the Vejas website that push for a more ideal fashion culture.

Toronto-based designer Vejas Kruszewski has been sewing since age ten, posting his products to Tumblr by sixteen, and is currently in the running for the LVMH Prize as the youngest designer to participate in the competition at nineteen years old. Together with Baltimore-born stylist Marcus Cuffie, who met Kruszewski through purchasing an early Tumblr piece, he is tenaciously preparing for the fashion apocalypse and its pending rebirth. Their first collection last year for Fall 2015 depicted the aftermath of such an event with transgender models of varying races looking battle torn and oil stained in unisex uniforms for the survivalist of distressed leathers, buckled shearling armor, and crafted cutouts where fabric appears to have been scorched away from the fictional heat.

The Spring collection hasn’t steered us yet to a peaceful Utopia, still slightly militaristic in feel with heavy grommeting, leather buckle details, and emphasized visible seams that denote utility as if reinforced for added durability. Much resilience is needed in the work towards an all-inclusive world.

ALEX MULLINS

Designer Alex Mullins’s favorite narratives have always been the ones depicting cowboys and Indians, to which he may be able to attribute his outstanding sense of color, texture, and pattern. Whatever wasn’t innate or absorbed from his artistic family Mullins learned to refine at Central Saint Martins as a student of the fashion prints program. After interning at brands like Jeremy Scott, Diane Von Furstenberg, and Alexander McQueen, where he worked in the print and embellishment department, Mullins set up his own brand in 2013. He says he focuses on menswear not only because of its closer attention to detail and fit, but for the fact that he can try on the clothes and really get a sense of what they feel like, essential to his definition of quality. Past collections have featured hand-painted tribal prints and Indian motifs, a patchwork of portraits as if by a mad cowboy artisan living in Seventies London, hand-cut petal appliqués, broad flat-brimmed hats, and the deep indigo blues of the West.

For Spring, Mullins reveals another arc of the canvas, evoking memories of summer with crayon drawings and graffiti colored outside the lines on loose judo-style silhouettes of bleached cotton and white denim—a brief reprieve from the Nevada desserts for an abstract reminiscence.