What the Other Half Wears

Even in fashion-conscious New York, the menswear look suggesting a slim scarecrow wearing too-short pants has only limited appeal. So what else can the boys buy? Fashion week has offered up a few hints at what will be on the shelves for spring 2009.The younger, design-savvy man is the holy grail of men’s retailing. Get him hooked and he’ll buy clothes from the same company season after season. At Hickey Freeman, they’ve started a new brand, Hickey, to do just that. The brand is operating off the mother ship’s grid. There, a young designer named Aaron Levine, the sort of nerdy fop who wears heavy black frames and a collar pin as a tie bar, is making fantastic tailored clothes that are as funky and casual as they are intelligent and erudite. “We’re trying to bring natty back,” Mr. Levine said as he described the young brand’s design philosophy.“Natty” may be just the word to describe the clothes in this collection, with its references to the Ivy League style of the late 1950s. Here are summer-weight Donegal tweeds and Scottish Estate checks, unlined gray suits with double-track pinstripes made out of a scratchy Fresco fabric, corduroy and seersucker suits, shawl-collar sweaters and skinny ties.Though the clothes come straight out of a dressier 1950s New York with jazz clubs and literary journals, they’ll be worn by guys graduating from J. Crew’s preppy weekend wear into a pricier workday wardrobe. “These pieces will last,” Mr. Levine said of the clothing.At Trovata, John Whitledge took the same theme in a different direction. Trovata is known for combining East Coast boarding school values with a West Coast surfing attitude. But for spring 2009, Mr. Whitledge meets both ideas halfway with a Midwestern-inspired ode to getaways on the Great Lakes. Nautical stripes, patch-pocket suits, and hopsack blazers keep the mid-century melody rolling. But here it’s easy to see the inspiration of Filson in the waxed-cotton jackets and big black-and-white plaids.Trovata has a unisex feel; the masculine clothes have a self-deprecating charm and the women’s clothes have a playful take on menswear. Both sides benefit from the encounter.At the center of the mainstream, Perry Ellis used a smattering of influences to create a range of pieces such as a Members Only-style jacket with contrast piping, pajama-inspired shirts, and an orange turtleneck with tie-dye-like white rings. Bright greens and lavenders were mixed into glen plaids or used as a base under white pin-striped shorts.If fashion shows are less about the individual pieces of clothing and more about the firm’s view of what men want to be, the Perry Ellis show suggested an International Male catalog. Duckie Brown, the avant-garde Canadian team, on the other hand, made a mostly indecipherable statement.Here, the signature look was a reckless urban bike messenger. Covered head-to-toe with shiny black layers that incorporated long shorts, leggings, thin bomber jackets, and skin-tight gloves, the Duckie Brown boy was more out-to-lunch than menacing. Though the models were not wearing iPods, it was too easy to imagine them walking to their own inner soundtrack.In suits, Duckie Brown has taken the shrunken look in a new direction. Short jackets with wide bodies gave the models an uncomfortable look, as if they were walking with a broomstick across their backs even as the wrinkled and rumpled fabric gave them a slouchy nonchalance. But the most out-there idea from this provocative label was a set of gray-and-black “Cosby”-like sweaters that bloomed and ballooned from narrow shoulders to voluminous waistlines.

What the Other Half Wears

What the Other Half Wears

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