Making the normal abnormal: revolutionaries march into Paris

Radicalising menswear is a tough job in Paris, which lacks the male fashion traditions of a place like London

Models present creations from the Fall/Winter 2015/16 Men's collection by US designer Rick Owens during the Paris Fashion Week, in Paris, France (EPA/IAN LANGSDON)

Radicalising menswear is tough. It’s especially tough in a city like Paris which, while without the menswear traditions of London (spanning back to the birth of the three-piece suit in the seventeenth century) or Milan (to the birth of the sharp suit in the early twentieth century), nevertheless has a bourgeoise slant.

It also has the haute couture, which kicks off on Monday. And while the couture only dresses the fairer sex, its painstaking workmanship can be utilised by both.

That’s one of the things Kim Jones enjoys most about his position at Louis Vuitton. “I'm interested in that idea of personal luxury,” says Jones, “where you know what it is, and people that are interested in it know what it is, but it does't have to be overstated.”

He actually said that to me about a collection designed a year ago, but it defines his approach to Louis Vuitton menswear. Time is personal luxury for Jones - the time it takes to complicate simple stuff like like denim jeans (needle-punched into cashmere), shearling trunks (laser-etched with swirly rope patterns), or wool duffle-coats (flocked to infinity). Those techniques are so meticulously realised you can’t twig their intricacy from twenty paces. Or even two.

Kim Jones' version of the pea coat in Paris (AFP)

That is sometimes a problem. Not for his super-luxe customers, who no doubt enthuse geekily over seams, lining and all that flocking - but for the rest of us. Relatively few people get to see these Vuitton clothes up close, and even fewer can afford them.

It sometimes feel as if Jones’ talent is restricted to innovative fabrics, rather than innovative fashion overall. There was that feeling with his autumn/winter 2015 collection, devoted to the late Christopher Nemeth - a ground-breaking menswear designer born of the eighties London club scene. His favourite songs, mixed by Nellee Hooper, soundtracked a show envisaged by Jones as a celebration of Nemeth’s life and work.

But said work was about exaggerated, experimental shapes and humble home-crafted materials - the latter antithetical to Vuitton, and to Jones’ designs there, for all his admiration for the man.

There was much use of a gnarled Nemeth rope print, on multiple iterations of the classic (or standard) pea-coat, or fused cleverly with Vuitton’s chequerboard Damier graphics on bags that will cost as much as a suburban settee (or three). No ‘Hard Times’ here.

Jones is a brilliant fashion designer, as well a superb textile technician. You hoped for more of the former and could have done with less of the latter.

It was odd to contrast with Rick Owens, who also chose the pea-coat as a starting point for his winter show. He turned it sideways, and slantways, and longways, and backways, like Willy Wonka’s great glass elevator. Owens’ is a elevator too, of classic masculine sportswear, shaking it by the scruff of its neck - perhaps displacing said neck to the thigh, like a porthole onto flesh.

Fetish was the idea, to fetishise ordinary items like Shetland sweaters (elongated into fuzzy rompers), or that pea-coat. Making the normal abnormal. How radical.