Bold Shoulders Empower Menswear for Spring 2024
Whether people need a shoulder to cry on or just want to ensure no one messes with them, bold shoulders are in for spring 2024, adding to the empowerment trend underway in menswear.
At Comme des Garçons Homme Plus, Rei Kawakubo broke with convention by attaching shoulder pads to the tops of jackets, rather than inserting them inside the lining. Kawakubo’s experiment, while radical, “didn’t distract from her handsome proportions, luxurious fabrics — and the reality that guys still look fantastic in suits,” wrote WWD international editor Miles Socha.
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Walter Van Beirendonck got crafty with padding as well, adding it to blousons and flight jackets that looked as if an airship had landed on them, while ERL‘s Eli Russell Linnetz used it to fake bulky shoulder muscles underneath silver lurex tops.
Elsewhere, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons took Joseph Beuys’ arresting sculptural forms as their inspiration for strong-shouldered cotton poplin outerwear, tucked into pinch-waist pants or shorts. The result, wrote Socha, “was something arrestingly new that is bound to influence the shape of menswear in the future.”
Rick Owens and Saint Laurent’s Anthony Vaccarello also leaned heavily into the exaggerated V-line, the former with strange little smokestack protrusions on shoulders that widened out to linebacker proportions and the latter with scaled-up Le Smoking jackets that matched the modernist grandeur of Berlin’s Neue Nationalgalerie where the show was held.
Meanwhile, Sean Suen, Hed Mayner and Valentino’s Pierpaolo Piccioli were among those feeling for rectangles, hinging their boxy, drop-shoulder looks on equally wide pants (another standout trend this season), while Alexander McQueen and 3.Paradis went curvilinear with shoulders in the shape of elephant ears.
And at JordanLuca, the overall silhouette was marked by what designers Jordan Bowen and Luca Marchetto dubbed the “bulldog” shoulder. As Milan correspondent Sandra Saliban reported, these lent trench coats and blazers “the impression of bulk and forward movement to metaphorically telegraph men’s need to keep going with determination.”
Launch Gallery: Men’s Spring 2024 Trend: Bold Shoulders
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