“For me, the men’s and the women’s, they are kind of like one entity. I really want the men and women to be able to talk to each other.” Antonin Tron was riffing as we riffled the rails of his first pre-spring collections for Balmain, including this first-ever menswear collection for the house. “I don’t necessarily think of them as a couple,” he qualified: “but I think at Balmain the women are quite sexy and out there. And if I was to do something very different for men, it would be weird.”
Looking at his rails simultaneously, that relationship was manifest in substance as well as spirit: “We have a lot of overcrossing material,” Tron confirmed. Yet there was one fundamental difference in his approach to the two wardrobes: while his Balmain woman is an imagined character, his man is more internalized. “I’m also making things that I can’t find myself,” he said. The tailoring block, for instance, arose from his frustration with suits that were either too narrow or too oversized. Here the shoulders were strong, the waist defined and the fit flattering without constriction: very much surfer’s suiting. “Clothes have to help you, no?”
This approach was also apparent in a bodacious pair of heavy cotton canvas trousers, artfully distressed and cut with articulated knees, whose engineered construction looked more thoughtful than luxury utilitarianism tends to. Alongside them was a boxy, leather-collared canvas jacket whose pockets were edged with metal rivets: work-kink.
Reference-wise Tron’s masculine pantheon ranges from the impishness of 1990s Brad Pitt to the gothic wasted glamour of Lou Reed and Andrew Eldritch, the Sisters of Mercy frontman whose band Tron has seen 25 times. Most significant is David Nuuhiwa, the Hawaiian surfer who disrupted and drove forward that pursuit in California during the 1960s and ’70s. What appeals to Tron, he said, is less the beach aesthetic than Nuuhiwa’s impulse to experiment and push forward.
These influences washed through a wardrobe that veered between faded denim and utilitarian outerwear, leather tailoring, laced trousers, leopard-print silks, and richly embroidered evening pieces (many of whose kaleidoscopically immersive fabrics were, like the denim, shared with the womenswear). The double-breasted suiting was especially powerful, its confidently controlled proportions offering a co-ordinated counterpoint to the more flamboyant material treatments.
Tron sees this sensuality as a rejection of bourgeois convention in luxury: the class-generated current his personal temperament crashes against. His instinct is that luxury should enable freedom rather than impose rules. Entwined within spirit and material, the central filament that connects this new Balmain man and the new Balmain woman is Tron himself. “I think slowly, I’m finding that line: I’m finding the woman and the man, basically.”
