He sidles up next to me at the bar and I have to pretend I’m not looking. He’s all scruffy hair, unshaven, skinny jeans and checked torso. I imagine he probably has a knitted sweater or leather jacket he’ll sling over his broad shoulders when it gets cold later (I am the female heterosexual cliché, I fantasise about men and their clothes and it turns me on). From the corner of my eye I watch him exchange money with the bartender, and then- he’s gone.
Momentarily disappointed I lift my glass to my lips, and even before I can sip there is another standing in his place, all scruffy hair, unshaven, skinny jeans and checked torso. He probably has a knitted sweater or leather jacket too.
This is the quintessential Australian male fashion-scape: generally predictable, rarely undulating, and extremely sexy. If I had to make a sweeping observation of Australian male fashion, I’d say it goes from Chuck Bass prep to devil-may-care skater boy to guitar slinging music hero and back again with relative ease.
Every now and then this scene is fractured by the avant garde; a specter of a male dressed all in black or in an explosion of clashing colours and patterns, with layer upon layer of
Damir Doma style drapery, sometimes with sculptural features, innovative accessories and Margiela-esque sunglasses. My personal tastes generally eschew the experimentally garbed male; I like my fashion guy to be masculine (without crossing into that no mans land of bootleg jeans and wife-beaters) but I do believe there is something to be said for fashion as an art form, and for originality in style, and that this should extend to men as much as it does to women.
Menswear in Australia has a fairly low profile. Generally, it’s practical, easy to wear and put together, as well as being fairly hardy and well made. The local avant garde in menswear on the other hand, is more difficult to come by, and it’s hard to tell whether this is the result of flagging designers or because of a lack of public demand. Labels like
Friedrich Gray,
Trimapee and
Chronicles of Never embrace a children of the night, nomadic future warrior look, picking up where overseas designers like Rick Owens and Ann Demeulemeester leave off, while remaining distinctly unisex- indicative that perhaps the Australian market is not as avant-savvy as one would hope.
Likewise,
Romance Was Born takes on elements of the zeitgeist, casting bursting colour, print, texture and unusual shape against their menswear. However, even Romance Was Born falls short at a retail and practical level; outlandish pieces shown in excessive, exuberant ensembles on the catwalk are watered down to be worn quite simply, paired with plainer pieces like monochrome t-shirts or standard jeans.
So it seems that Australian menswear is at a quandary- on one hand, we have wary consumers who are either disinterested in, fearful of, or uneducated about the avant garde, while on the other hand we have several high profile designers who dally with experimental menswear but who haven’t completely committed to its cause. It’s an archetypal chicken and egg situation, and at the risk of sounding like a jargon spouting politician, one in which we have to unite together against in order to overcome.
Inviting the avant garde into menswear is an important- nay, vital- step for the Australian fashion industry. While we have talents like Dion Lee, Tina Kalivas and Christopher Esber (to name but a few) creating directional, innovative women’s wear, so should we have their male counterparts dedicated to reinventing menswear, challenging all we think we know about men’s fashion to push Australian menswear out past the visible horizon.