Inevitably, everyone's tentatively fishing around for signs of a response to the…what do we call it again ? ...Crunch ? ...Crash ? Raf Simons was having none of that. "I wanted to present something powerful", he declared uncategorically. And what came to him was the strength of the sartorial, the essence of tailored menswear. Hence, a silhouette that was almost Edwardian : a high-closing, longer jacket with a waist so suppressed it produced an hourglass effect. Rounded hips were echoed in the rounded shoulders of tops, and in seaming that rounded out the backsides of trousers. The first outfit featured a coat, the last a jacket in a black velvet with a seductively viscous sheen. In between came herringbones, shearlings, wools striated like chenille, and extraordinary jacquards that looked like mineral strata. The simple assumption was that they were hand-painted, but no, they were woven. Kudos to Simons' nonpareil fabric research. Even the stuff that looked dry and unforgiving was surprisingly soft, yet everything was marched out to the rock-hard rat-a-tat-tat soundtrack of Portishead's "Machine Gun". As tricky as that all sounds, it yielded a tantalizing fashion paradox : sobriety and sensuality, rigor and release.
