Will you be getting back to fashion? As men’s fashion week, which opens on June 22, is in full swing until June 26 in Paris, an unexpected guest has made his way to the calendar at the last minute: British fashion heavyweight Burberry, English jewel with the globally recognized trench coat which, in normal times, presents its collections during London fashion week. This Parisian getaway goes rather well to Riccardo Tisci, the artistic director. He offers a refocused collection for men, more sober and more personal than usual, far from the abundant and not always easy to digest parades for women that he has been able to sign since his arrival at Burberry, in 2018, where his bourgeois wardrobe, sporty and sexy, is not necessarily unanimous.
Filmed in London, the video presenting the spring-summer 2022 collection zigzags models in a silted setting located at the Millenium Mills, a disused industrial building where a flour mill once operated. Muscular boys, slightly tribal jewels attached to their noses or systematically bare ears and arms, pass in front of big shiny cars.
The rear-view mirrors occasionally reflect their silhouettes, in short vests with open backs, leather jackets, jumpsuits with straps, openwork top on the chest with a majestic collar, red or green T-shirts cut wide with abstract patterns, sets black with white stitching. These fellows who seem to land on a set of Mad Max wear black pants with kneepads and shirts printed with “Universal Passport” as if to go sailing in distant hot countries.
It is in particular the memory of a stunning rave party in India, when he was in his twenties, that nourished Riccardo Tisci. This explains why, at first limited to the sound of footsteps that sink regularly into the sand, the sound of the video gradually fills up with Strange Planet, a piece by Shpongle, a British psyche group from the 1990s, on which extras triumph, eyes closed, flexible hips, head tilted back. And that a long buttoned coat can open on simple black briefs: rather practical when the trance rises and the body temperatures become unbearable …
“I wanted to baptize this collection “Universal Passport” by reflecting on what could connect us across borders, explains Riccardo Tisci. For me, music has always had this power to make my mind wander, nourish my creativity and teach me to express myself freely. After this long period when we were far from each other, I wanted to create a presentation that could bring people together through music in a moment of celebration, by translating this feeling of letting go that one can feel in the listening, this carelessness that we experience by being fully in the moment. “
The Burning Man-style atmosphere, an extraordinary festival organized in the Nevada desert, did not however make him forget to play with the very gentlemanly codes of Burberry. “The collection is free and experimental, with the intention of deconstructing the house’s signatures and offering them new perspectives”, he comments. If the tartan disappears, the trench, on the other hand, is there and takes it for its rank: Riccardo Tisci recomposes it in an apron version or in a coat with scratch and games of symmetrical bands, like a rib cage or a reminiscence. bondage. Mostly black, rough, almost punk, the whole thing should delight fans of the Italian who, during his reign at Givenchy, between 2005 and 2017, revered him for his chiaroscuro streetwear and the assurance full of sex. appeal of his locker room. At Burberry, this is the first time that we also perceive his paw directly.
