A resort collection is by nature a transitional grouping — and this was, biographically, my most transitional collection, as it is a smaller collection that is a musing on my transition from Tailor to designer. The ability to ask questions and provide personal insights and be a voice in a conversation about identity is the biggest change from being a craftsperson to embracing being an artist.
It's where I worked out the baseline of the kind of clothing I wanted to make: my version of tailoring, built out of the things I wanted to take with me from that background and the things I wanted to leave behind. And indeed, underneath the format shift is a working meditation on tradition.
Tradition, when you feel trapped by it, is just peer pressure from dead people. The pieces here are the sound of me trying to figure out what a suit can be when it stops taking orders from the past — what a jacket can look like when you strip out the visual cues of utility, or the visual cues of formality, and see what's left. I don't particularly like imposed formality. What I like is elegance, and this is where I first started separating the two.
The Eisenhower jacket that would carry into Collection 3 as a signature; the tuxedo built as an actual garment for real occasions rather than a costume for a formality performance; the Bravo double-breasted made as a jacket rather than half of a suit; jeans with a self-belt; a tailor's habit of letting fabric do the quiet work. If Collections 2 and 3 are the arguments the brand makes, Resort 26/27 is a reflection on where the vocabulary got settled.