Originally published as a comment response in facebook group The Archive. Click here to view the full collection.
Here are my thoughts. I don’t love this collection but I think there’s certainly a lot to discuss.
I see the collection as mockery, satire of both contemporary men’s fashion and the obsession with and influence of his archive collections on the relatively ignorant audience that parades (and arguably appropriates) his work today. The constants of the collection - the headwear, umbrellas, and boots - all come across as crude figments of futurism, recalling dated attempts at designing the future and referencing sci-fi films like Blade Runner with use of translucent plastic, neon, patent leather, etc. To me, those are signifiers of the obsession with the ‘next big thing,’ which is what Raf’s archives are right now; he penned those ‘futuristic’ designs over a decade ago, to relatively little acclaim, but now they are all the rage. And I believe that with this collection, Raf is highlighting the carelessness and eagerness with which others are citing and borrowing from them as both consumers of fashion and as producers.
One of the most obvious signs of this is Look 17: to me, an obvious play on the appropriation and degradation of the original meaning and context of the Peter Saville cover art, perhaps Raf’s best known motifs. The Unknown Pleasures cover is placed on [from what I can tell is] a blank black tee, and literally ripped in half to make way for the next seemingly copy-pasted image: New Order's Power, Corruption & Lies cover, placed in exactly the same in position and of the exact same size, devoid of any sensitivity towards its context and use. Here, i think Raf went with all black (one of the simplest looks in the collection in terms of color scheme) to ensure focus on the images. Anyone at all versed in fashion will roll their eyes at the laziness in design of simply plastering once meaningful art onto a blank and surrounding it in black. Hard to say whether he's criticizing his own work or calling out imitators, but I think there’s an argument for both. Adding to this effect (still on Look 17), there is almost no silhouette here, no nuance, just those images taking center stage in a way that so clearly screams thoughtlessness of design.
Look 5 echoes this sentiment - the murky black graphic is printed onto an overly large, strangely sized purple blank, and attached to an otherwise unassuming (just a bit oversized) white coat with practically bungee cords. Again, the image is plastered front-and-center on the garment - it's a typical, dark Raf-ian image, but placed seemingly out of context on a bright white coat with the pink headwear and a pink plastic umbrella. To me he's implying appropriation of the image, he's trying to show laziness - perhaps he's pointing out the contextual shortcomings of the contemporary fashion world against his beloved archive collections.
One more, what the hell - Look 11. I’m just working off of the Vogue runway shots so I can’t see every angle (and I haven’t read up on the origins of everything or what everyone else is saying yet), but the first thing that struck me was that the sweater’s design looks almost like a Sterling Ruby painting, and of course is oversized and drapey to the point where it's falling off. This reveals a minimal, crudely cut top in white underneath, and a sort of pink scarf poking out at the waist… I think there are a lot of ways to think about this look, and combined with the crazy bottom half, it’s one of the more thematically interesting of the collection. The trousers are cut amateurishly, cropped to a point of absurdity, mismatched and misshapen, as if the whole bottom half could’ve been sleek all-black but with tailoring gone horribly wrong. Perhaps he's making a point highlighting how ridiculously out of place his usual clichés look across the collection, capitalizing on the point with the umbrellas and stupid looking headgear across each look.
Although I don’t hate it - I think I’m too much of a Raf fan to ever really hate his work - this collection does disappoint me, just as the last several have, visually as well as thematically. As someone who (like many) first learned of Raf by falling in love with individual garments, it’s disappointing to see him go off on all these weird tangents of the last couple seasons, like mega sized sweaters, giant puffy coats, and now big ‘futuristic’ raincoats. Raf is no [Alexander] McQueen - when I look at his collections, I can’t help but also think beyond the runway. Part of what made all those archive shows so damn cool was that they were not only ingenious visually and thematically, they really made you want the clothes to own and wear. But even if you look past that, don’t you get tired of all this referencing of his archives as of late? And however you choose to view it, self-criticism or recognition of imitators, I think the “To the archives, no longer relevant” attitude that we’ve seen the past couple years seems disappointing and stale in comparison to Raf’s much more captivating older work. So no, I don’t believe Raf has fallen off and is completely out of ideas, but to me this season did leave plenty to be desired.