To quote the Trovata invitation : "The French have a word for it… je nais se quoi ". Wait, shouldn't that be "je ne sais quoi " ? A Trovatite gamely assured me that this is how they say "it" -that indefinable little something that makes someone special- in Canada. That may be rubbish, but I suppose it's a better story than "je ne sais rien " ('I know nothing'). Linguistic gobbledygook aside, it was actually Paris in the late 1960s -when the city was all het up with sex and politics- that John Whitledge was thinking about when he created the new collection. It was a time when men still looked quite straight, but they had change on their minds. So Whitledge ran a gamut from the gentleman's 3-piece suit to the student's duffel coat, with side trips into a hint of military and vintage-y knitwear. With the after-images of Scott Sternberg's brilliant presentation for Band of Outsiders (coincidentally focusing on exactly the same time in exactly the same city -next week on Morphosis) still lingering in the mind, it was hard to escape the conclusion that clothes this prosaic will never gain anything by being paraded on a catwalk. And even in tableaux à la Sternberg, they could only be elevated by fantastic fabric and peerless technique. Regrettably, there was "rien " of either on show here
