FALL 2014 MENSWEAR Patrik Ervell

FALL 2014 MENSWEAR Billy Reid

FALL 2014 MENSWEAR Band Of Outsiders

Band of Outsiders designer Scott Sternberg, who splits his time between New York and Los Angeles, feels the pain of print media's slow demise and expressed his sentiments the best way he knew how: in a men's collection.

"It started on a visit to the Los Angeles Timesbuilding to shoot a Polaroid campaign [Spring '13] with Frank Ocean," said Sternberg at his preppy, youth-y presentation today, referring to the quirky seasonal campaigns he himself shoots with celebrities in uncelebrity-like locations around SoCal. "I was looking at the building and thinking about the end of print, when I felt a deep sense of, not sadness, but nostalgia."

Sternberg thus channeled the buzzy, frenetic spirit of old-school newsrooms, cobbling together mismatched patterns like windowpane and polka dot in clever and appealing ways. Some of those polka dots were filled in with classified copy, which could also be found on ties. The palette pinged between black and white, sticking mostly to gray scale, occasionally darting into lush green dégradé or red-blue tartan. Squint and you could almost make out Clark Kent in Sternberg's thought process, but no, these were old-fashioned newsboys, topped with jaunty little newsboy caps to prove it.

Nostalgia aside, Sternberg has plenty to look forward to. Namely, his first store, right where his presentation took place, at 70 Wooster Street in Soho. When the space, which will include his showroom, opens in the summer, it'll look nothing like the raw concrete storefront it is now. Expect an eccentric, lovable California vibe.

FALL 2014 MENSWEAR Opening Ceremony

Legend has it that the name "Antwerp" is derived from the Dutch term hand werpen, meaning "hand-thrown." There's a whole story about a giant guarding the river, who would cut off people's hands. Anyway, this evening's Opening Ceremony show was an appealingly motley mix of things Belgian and, more specifically, Antwerp-ian, and among these, the mooted etymology of the city's name played a starring role. The collection's key print, for instance, was a fingerprint swirl deployed in the most sculpturally ambitious of the men's and women's looks. 

What really got your attention, though, was the graphic quality of the clothes. Obviously, Humberto Leon and Carol Lim couldn't vibe on Antwerp without imbibing the city's fashion history. Raf was a presence here, to be sure, but Lim and Leon mostly seemed interested in translating the linearity and sobriety of the Antwerp look into clothes with that jaunty Opening Ceremony mien. Essentially, they did this by making the clothes very, very graphic. That was elaborated in the women's clothes by employing a lot of asymmetry; the men's looks featured trompe l'oeil layering and zips that worked to adjust proportion and volume. Overall, this men's collection articulated a stronger point of view than the womenswear—there was a clear silhouette proposition and a good number of very strong pieces, such as quilted anoraks. The women's range didn't cohere as well, not least because the emphasis on asymmetry produced too many looks that just came off looking messy. Taken together, though, these collections did affirm that Lim and Leon's ambitions as designers continue to advance.