Picture this: It’s late June, and summer has finally—miraculously!—appeared. Days are longer, warmer, filled with languor, hazy sunshine, and, most of all, promise. Even better: A vacation looms in the not-so-distant future. Someplace near the water, on a beach, along a craggy coast. You distractedly toil away at your job, but your mind is dreamily half focused on the impending holiday. Perhaps this has even happened to you. Perhaps it’s happening to you…right now.
That ripe, expectant feeling is what Auralee designer Ryota Iwai had in mind for his spring collection, shown along an open-air colonnade outside of the Odéon Théâtre de l’Europe on a sweltering day in Paris, the first of the men’s shows here. And so it opened with relaxed tailoring in inky black, earthy umber, and rich cocoa, before gently evolving into something more festive, a touch tropical, with a freer, looser spirit. A final section of the show combined the two—as when you return to the office with little mementos from your trip, carefully braided into your office attire.
“A trip is not necessarily the destination,” the designer said through an interpreter backstage. “It’s being in the office but having that excitement back in your mind.” That excitement expressed itself through knit T-shirts in sunset-hued stripes or via hints of aquamarine tropical prints peeking out from a dark sweater or coat. A filmy baseball tee was paired with the palest of blue corduroys, and a cherry red zip-up hoodie was rendered in a nubby fabric reminiscent of a terrycloth towel.
“There’s something about that freedom of being on holiday that kind of allows you to sort of be a little bit more expressive, and I thought that that was just very charming,” Iwai said backstage. In fact, charming was a word the designer invoked repeatedly; he held that while some may consider a Hawaiian shirt cheesy or touristy, he found it “charming.” And while a certain coy playfulness unfolded in the collection, Iwai ultimately has a much more refined point of view. His elegant shapes possess a certain restraint and simplicity, like the lean, lightweight outerwear styles or the simple pull-on dresses—one ruched in sunshine yellow, the other an elongated black T-shirt with a satiny white lining.
In addition to the expert styling (half-tucked collars, anklets over pant hems), done in collaboration with Charlotte Collet, Iwai’s calling card is his superb palette—this season is aquatic blues and hits of dazzling crimson or lemony yellows—and his nuanced, obsessive take on fabrics, all of them proprietary. He is known not for dramatic swings but for fine-tuning the details of the humble everyday. One of those gracefully cut brown suits, for example, comes in a wool-linen blend that not only gives it an airy feel but, upon closer inspection, has a gently flecked, heathered appearance. Shirting had a barely-there floatiness, and what one might mistake for denim work pants could actually be the softest of broken-in cotton. And those knit tees have an almost crunchy, pebbly quality that will make them a sure fit for next year’s inevitable heat wave.
When asked to pick a look or two that best represented the collection, he grimaced (like picking a favorite child!) before settling on two male-female pairs. One pair featured that tropical motif layered under a sweater and papery leather shorts in Hockney-pool blue for him and a crinkly two-piece bathing suit shown under a darkened, half-buttoned coat with a plaid lining for her. The other pair included a couple of slate gray suits, again combined with unexpected underpinnings—a striped cardigan for him and a floral shirt for her—worn slightly undone and cut with a certain post-vacation ease. “It brings together the feeling we’re trying to get out with the collection, that idea of the freedom of travel,” Iwai said. “It really pushes you to be a little bit more adventurous—not necessarily who you are when you’re in your daily life.”
