#kimjones

Ten Years of Fashion East’s MAN

A Craig Green model backstage at the Sorting Office, 7th January 2013 © Rebecca Thomas/Fashion East

Late one September evening, ten years ago, the pavement outside Brick Lane’s Truman Brewery filled up with people waiting for the last show of London Fashion Week. Nothing unusual about that, in the city whose fashion weeks have turned passive-aggressive queueing an art-form - bar the fact that, this time, the crowd were lining up to watch a menswear show.

‘The idea came into my head whilst watching the Central Saint Martins M.A. show that February,’ Lulu Kennedy - founder of Fashion East, the support scheme which had already been working with the capital’s young womenswear designers for several seasons - explains. ‘I was like, ‘Why is no one supporting this incredible menswear talent in London?’ So I approached Topman to be our partner, and by September we were doing our first show together. It really was as simple as that.’ ‘Lulu mentioned that she’d seen so many great graduating menswear collections that year,’ Topman’s Gordon Richardson continues, 'and we unanimously agreed we couldn’t let those designers fade into anonymity.’
Kennedy and Richardson were tapping into a new sense of energy in London menswear. Adventurous stores like Dover Street Market, bStore, Oki-Ni and The Pineal Eye had begun to open doors for the city’s young designers; the resurgent clubland scene was in the middle of spawning an exuberant new aesthetic; the first generation of menswear bloggers were starting to emerge, eager to anoint their own new fashion heroes; and new magazines like GQ StyleandAnother Man, both launched that same month, heralded what would become an extraordinary print media renaissance.
It wasn’t the first time someone had tried to do something about promoting London’s menswear; Fifty-five years earlier, almost to the day, a band of brands led by Aquascutum had launched a men’s fashion showcase at the Savoy, held under the banner of the British Menswear Guild; and in the late Nineties, a short-lived London Men’s Fashion Week championed a wave of successful contemporary labels like Katharine Hamnett, Burro and Designworks. But each time, the promised menswear golden age failed to materialise - and so, whilst Simons, Slimane and Lang were producing provocative, challenging, acclaimed men’s fashion in Paris and New York, British designers - quite literally - had nowhere to go.
‘There really was no place to show menswear in London,’ says Siv Støldal, one of the three designers who took part in that first event. ‘I used to show my collections off the womenswear schedule, or as part of gallery exhibitions, outside of the calendar altogether. I can’t remember if I was invited or if I applied to take part, but I remember I was completely blown away by the opportunity.’  For Patrick Söderstam, who also showed that night, it came about more casually. ‘My PR at the time, Mandi Lennard, told me that the people who organised [MAN] were interested in me doing it. I’d put together a collection that I’d been working on  for some time, without any intention of selling or producing – I was just realising ideas.’
That first season set the template for the decade that followed; unplanned, uneven, and brilliantly unpredictable. Söderstam sent out colourful polka-dot ruffles, supersized jackets and paint streaked jeans; Benjamin Kirchhoff teamed dishevelled knits and baggy tailoring with jelly sandals; whilst Støldal, the most established of the three, showed thoughtfully luxurious sportswear and inflatable shirts. ‘I was working with the stylist Thom Murphy at the time,’ she remembers, ‘and he went around the East End hiring all these boys from boxing gyms. Two of the best boys were only sixteen, but were already wearing electronic ankle bracelets; they each had a policeman following them everywhere - to the studio fittings, hanging out backstage. It was quite intense; I remember one of them threatening to kill the hairdresser if he fucked up his hair …’ ‘I remember being quite stressed backstage,’ Söderstam reflects, ‘while my friends were smoking weed with the other models. I remember the people who did the music for the show [Swedish electro band Revl9n] played the wrong track, they were supposed to play a more hardcore version. And I remember Mandi saying that she didn’t like the trashy old sneakers I had the models wearing - and I remember thinking she was fucking wrong.’
As it turned out, the show was a runaway success. The next day, Opening Ceremony called, wanting to buy Støldal’s inflatable pieces, and Söderstam had interest from Barneys New York. ‘If I’d been looking for a career in the fashion business, the show might have had a big impact.’ he concedes. But he wasn’t, and it didn’t; he returned to Sweden, where he became a university lecturer. Kirchhoff also discontinued his menswear, switching focus to womenswear and triumphantly re-emerging under the Meadham Kirchhoff banner. Only Støldal carried on, becoming the first of 12 designers to have completed the MAN hat trick, getting invited back for the scheme’s maximum three seasons. ‘We were so hungry for it,’ she says, ‘and used every show to make each a bit better than the last.’
MAN also grew with each season, forging a reputation for its consistently exciting, thought-provoking design. And along the way, it became the nucleus of what is now London Collections:Men, a thriving four-day event which has solidified British menswear’s place on the international schedules. Today, MAN alumni are in some of the most powerful positions in menswear - from Loewe’s JW Anderson, to Kim Jones at Louis Vuitton. Of the 32 designers showing at London Collections this season, 9 started out on the MAN catwalk - and a further 5 have featured in Fashion East’s subsidiary menswear presentations. Over the years, the British Fashion Awards’ menswear trophies have been on almost-permanent rotation amongst MAN stars like Jones, Anderson, Agi & Sam and Craig Green. ‘Obviously their talent was there from the outset,' Richardson reflects, 'but it’s humbling to know that through MAN’s support we’ve helped them on their way to success.’ And Topman itself has played a significant part in the story; for several seasons, it showed its premium line, Topman Design, as part of the MAN event, narrowing the gap between high-concept and the high street. ‘Topman Design had been in existence before MAN,’ Richardson quickly qualifies, ‘so it was really a natural extension of that. Showing alongside MAN was more about creating a more substantial and powerful menswear moment than anything else.’

Over the years, MAN has created no shortage of menswear moments. And this season, they’re looking backwards. For the first time, only two designers - Liam Hodges and Rory Parnell Mooney - will be featured, with the third slot devoted to a specially commissioned MAN Turns 10 film. Flicking through Fashion East’s archive, it’s clear there are no shortage of memories. ‘There are so many!’ Kennedy laughs. ‘I particularly loved when Chris Shannon sent his boys out in lip gloss and on-purpose tan lines … and Craig Green using Roxette’s ‘Listen To Your Heart’ for the entire show, which floored everyone.’ Richardson, meanwhile, singles out Aitor Throup’s haunting 2007 installation in Holborn’s derelict Sorting Office for special praise. But then he reconsiders; ‘Emotionally it will, however, always be the very first show, when it felt like we were on the cusp of something monumental.’
They were; it was. But along the way, there’s also the fun of seeing menswear’s front row weather their way through a decade’s worth of shifting hemlines and hairlines, and no shortage of opportunities to play spot-the-famous-face; over the years, models have ranged from boyband members to retired rally drivers (in a mobility scooter. Obviously.), to fashion designers Henrik Vibskov, Patrick Grant and William Richard Green. And there’s a nice circularity to the event, too: Hans Christian Madsen started out as studio manager for Carola Euler, while Thom Murphy, Stoldal’s stylist for that first show, returned to MAN four years later with New Power Studio. ‘Showing alongside my friend and hero Kim Jones was such a honour to me.’ remembers Carrie Munden of Cassette Playa - a label whose vibrant shows were regular highlights during MAN’s early years. 'It was also emotional to see my former assistant and (not so little) little brother Liam Hodges’ debut.’ Hodges, one of the showcase’s most recent success stories, returns the compliment; ‘My very first MAN experience was probably seeing Sonic the Hedgehog on Cassette Playa’s SS07 catwalk, when I first started studying fashion. That show, and some of the new menswear around that time, was when I first started getting interested in fashion, to be honest; I guess MAN is something I’ve always aspired to, from the start.’ It would be a wild overstatement to attribute menswear’s decade-long boom entirely to MAN, but it’s played a crucial part. That’s not to denigrate the part played by the resurgence of once-staid Savile Row, or the powerful international clout of homegrown megabrands like Burberry. But British menswear simply wouldn’t be what it has become without the stream of young designers who’ve left their mark on the MAN runway; Jaiden RVA James’ bondage gear, New Power Studio’ joss-stick crowns and dildo hats, Shaun Samson’s beach-bum blankets, Astrid Andersen’s ab-flashing sportswear, Alan Taylor’s exploded tailoring, Craig Green’s monastic robes (not to mention the plank headpieces that featured in his first show, which launched a thousand headlines and made MAN a Daily Mail staple) The clothing it has presented - tough, tender, angry, silly, sexy, cheeky, moving, baffling, provocative, bold - has made the language of modern British menswear immeasurably richer. It’s not all been perfect - and in the harsh world beyond the scheme’s supporting embrace, its graduates have gone on to encounter as much failure as success. Some (Jones, Anderson, Green) have become stars. Some have fallen off the radar, or stepped away from fashion entirely. But most have simply taken detours; Kesh, for example, moved to California, where she’s reinvented herself as a digital artist - hitting headlines earlier this year when Versace (allegedly) copied one of her t-shirt prints. Lotta Skeletrix moved to Paris, and became a womenswear designer: Ann-Sofie Back did likewise, in Sweden and New York. Aitor Throup returned to his studio, leaving the catwalk schedule behind to continue his endless experiments and refinements. And many, after their London years, went home; Støldal, for example, now works in Norway, as part of a collective called HaiK. Back in Scotland, Deryck Walker has collaborated with Harris Tweed, and forged parallel careers in tutoring, consulting and costume design. And Söderstam is in Sweden, where - ten years and four children later - he’s finally starting to feel his old appetite for fashion again, and is working under a new banner, #sawwwpop.
But all of the designers I speak to, no matter how their careers have evolved, stress MAN’s importance in their journey. Of all of them, though, Munden - who famously submitted her entry for the scheme in a pizza box, back in 2006 - perhaps sums it up at its exuberant, incestuous, optimistic best; ‘e v e r y t h i n g = the first level / the beginning + a family for life’

Katie Eary models backstage at Somerset House, 23rd September 2009 © 1972projects

A shorter version of this piece appeared in The Observer Magazine