Just when you thought the show schedule couldn’t get any crazier, our Fall 2018 Menswear calendars are actually looking a bit lighter than usual. Don’t get us wrong—it’s still going to be a jam-packed month of men’s shows, Pre-Fall appointments, couture week, and even a few early bird Fall 2018 women’s shows. But there are some noteworthy gaps, largely left by brands who are leaving the men’s calendar to host combined men’s and women’s shows during the ready-to-wear season.
While it’s certainly more efficient to join Gucci, Vetements, Bottega Veneta, and Jil Sander in doing a coed show, it means the menswear calendar has less star power. Still, we’d argue that it might at least keep everyone a little more sane. The early part of the year always feels especially crunched, to the point where the seasons aren’t just back-to-back, but they actually overlap. In the span of six weeks, we’ll have covered three collections by certain designers: Pre-Fall, menswear, and ready-to-wear.
Below, we’ve annotated the biggest changes to menswear—and we have a feeling there are more surprises in store this month.
1. Jonathan Anderson is combining his men’s and women’s collections into one show during the ready-to-wear season. His first coed JW Anderson show is scheduled for Saturday, February 17, the second day of London Fashion Week.
2. A.P.C. will not show a menswear collection, either. Jean Touitou has decided to combine his men’s and women’s collections into one presentation during Paris Fashion Week next month.
3. Balenciaga, too, is moving forward with combined shows during the ready-to-wear seasons, but Demna Gvasalia’s influence won’t be totally absent from Paris men’s week. The brand will debut its first men’s Pre-Fall collection in its Rue de Sèvres showroom on Friday, January 19. As with all things Gvasalia does, you can expect other men’s designers to follow suit. Kris Van Assche already added men’s Pre-Fall back in 2016, and Off-White’s Virgil Abloh introduced men’s Pre-Fall in November, explaining to Vogue’s Nicole Phelps that “the year is too long” and it’s one more opportunity to connect with customers.
4. A few other designers are missing from the men’s schedules this month, including Martine Rose, Topman Design, Ports 1961, Philipp Plein, and Tom Ford. Stay tuned, though—Ford tends to show on his own timeline.
5. Takahiro Miyashita and Undercover’s Jun Takahashi will join forces for a back-to-back show at Pitti Uomo in Florence. It’s destined to be a highlight of the men’s season; for starters, Miyashita hasn’t shown his menswear on the runway since 2009—since then, it’s just been by appointment—and the designers have been friends since the late ’90s.
6.. While there aren’t enough newcomers to fill in the gaps in the men’s calendar, Palomo Spain will show in Paris for the first time. Designer Alejandro Gómez is known for his romantic, gender-nonspecific clothes, and he was behind the lilac robe Beyoncé wore to announce the birth of her twins.
7. Sébastien Jondeau, known among fashion types as Karl Lagerfeld’s longtime bodyguard and personal assistant, will also debut a capsule collection for Lagerfeld’s self-named line at Pitti Uomo.
[“Source-vogue”]