All of a sudden, Hed Mayner found himself putting his fall collection together in a time of war. “War was always something that your father and grandfather talked about,” he said during a showroom visit. “Now, for the first time, it’s my generation.”
Mayner and his team persisted, focusing on a new tack for him: the classics, and tailoring in particular. The designer said he found it intimidating at first because he had never lived in an environment with easy access to stores, let alone vintage shops. But in the end, he discovered that distance actually gave him a form of freedom.
“I felt like I could deform things without breaking any rules,” he said. In lieu of modern mannequins, he and his studio padded out a vintage dummy and made body molds out of foam. The idea, he added, was to make clothes that look like there had already been a body inside them, as if the wearer were donning someone else’s proportions. “I wanted to have it be like 3D without cutting too much,” he said, noting that he tries not to work around themes and mood boards. “There’s no reference or history or culture, there’s the thing itself, and you work inside,” he said.
As journalists gathered round, the designer gamely played model, slipping on a chocolate herringbone peacoat and turning around to show how the back seam stands out. A gray four-way stretch fabric was printed with pinstripes to look like suiting, but actually takes on “a human form” when cut into an overcoat or trousers. “It lets me wear tailoring without feeling that I belong to a certain group or have a certain status in society,” the designer observed. Speaking of status, his ongoing collaboration with Reebok brings a reworking of a classic, ’90s-era brutalist sneaker.
True to form, trousers skewed ample and fluid. For shirting, Mayner found himself studying vintage Brooks Brothers styles. “I’m obsessed with diving into something, changing it completely, but keeping it as it is,” he said. One result was an almost crunchy striped shirt in a bonded cotton-aluminum fabric that holds its wrinkles artily. That one may resonate with loyalists, but in a seriously strong coat season Mayner showed that he can hold his own.