If the quintessence of New York womenswear is a hyper-polished uptown-girl chic, its male counterpart is the exact opposite : a downtown guy who dresses vintage or grunge. Those of you who watch "The City" on MTV know what I'm talking about. Yigal Azrouël is the personification of such a notion. His Fall presentation offered worn, lean looks such as might be de- and re-constructed by some hardscrabble guy on the Lower East Side (or at least the Lower East Side before it became a hotbed of trendy restaurants and schmancy housing developments). That's possibly a little reductive, given that such an individual would have needed a granny to knit him his handmade cardigan coat. And the Fair Isle capelet was also outside the parameters of grungeville. But Azrouël's layering -cotton jean jacket over stretched-out knit, for example- managed to capture the essential worn-out lassitude of slacker style.
