Alled-Martinez Men’s Spring 2023
Around the time Spanish designer Archie Alled-Martinez started to explore his queer identity in the Aughts, there was a term that kept going around: metrosexual.
It was only years later that the ramifications of the term — which he summed up as describing “a heterosexual man who behaves or does things that are usually associated with gay men or women” — fully hit home. “When I look back, wasn’t this all really homophobic?” he asked rhetorically.
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Hence his desire to reclaim that territory through a spring collection that skewed tight, short or low-cut — sometimes all at once.
To quote Millenium-era icon Paris Hilton: “that’s hot.”
It got even hotter with the locker room presentation that had guests peeping through openings in the wall to see the models.
What they saw was last season’s cargo pants revisited with a pronounced V-shaped cut on the front; doubled up jeans with a prominent metal zipper; T-shirts looked like they had been sprayed on, with derogatory terms describing gay men splashed across the front; a sleeveless plaid shirt that would require confidence to pull off — and washboard abs.
As for those really short shorts? They were back with a vengeance and with a denim version, too.
Alled-Martinez, who is following in Hilton’s footsteps by starring in Netflix’s “First Class,” a newly released reality TV show on a group of friends living the high life in Barcelona, noted there was something self-indulgent about revisiting these notions through the lens of today’s more progressive mentalities.
Just how many will have the confidence to indulge alongside him remains to be seen.
Launch Gallery: Alled-Martínez Men's Spring 2023
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