Downtown Fave Eckhaus Latta Is Finally Making Menswear
It would not be dramatic to say that, over the past nine years, Eckhaus Latta has remade the New York fashion scene in its image. There are the clothes: you can hardly shake a skateboard below Delancey Street without hitting an Eckhaus Latta ombré-dyed hoodie or pair of signature inverted-pocket jeans on a member of the brand’s intimidatingly cool tribe. There is the spectacle: editors, stylists, and interesting celebrities, if truth-serumed, would likely reveal that the brand’s show is the only truly essential New York Fashion Week ticket (even when it used to be held in Bushwick on Saturday morning). Perhaps most crucially, there is the matter of influence: the most exciting emerging designers in the city—like Vaquera, Collina Strada, and Lou Dallas—are the ones who emulate Mike Eckhaus and Zoe Latta’s cerebral, community-based approach to fashion, who make clothing for everyone who is bored by luxury brands but still want something cool and expensive to wear to gallery openings.
Now, Mike and Zoe, both 32, are expanding their vision with Eckhaus Latta’s first full menswear collection, unveiled Tuesday night at their Fall-Winter 2020 NYFW show. The choice of venue signaled new directions, and hinted at a deeper metaphor: for their first NYFW outing in Manhattan, they chose for a venue the now-closed, once-bedbug-infested South Street Seaport Abercrombie & Fitch store. “It was kind of funny, and why not?” Mike told me last week, when I asked if there was any deeper meaning to showing on the grave of a once-great American brand. But they didn’t let it go to waste. In a former temple to masculinity, Mike and Zoe unveiled a fluid and sophisticated idea of menswear that felt like nothing less than the future.
A few days before the show, I stopped by the brand’s temporary showroom in the Garment District. The design duo might as well be grizzled veterans of NYFW at this point, having shown 17 runway collections over the years, many of which have included an element of performance art or improvisational music (and, once, an orchestra of babies). But the atmosphere was still tinged with that special brand of pre-runway chaos. Mike and Zoe and a handful of employees had only moved into the space an hour before, the only decor folding chairs and a plastic table adorned with hummus and coffee. Zoe, who is based in L.A., was seeing the full collection for the first time. “I wasn’t before, but I’m very excited about the color,” she said, gesturing to several racks bursting with highlighter-yellow overcoats, blaze-orange suits, muddy acid-washed denim jackets, and a shirt that looked like it had been near the site of a lava lamp explosion.
In separate interviews, the designers told me that they had been having frequent phone conversations about the future direction of the label, and that the decision to finally place equal focus on clothes for men and women reflected a newfound wisdom. For years after the brand had graduated from RISD curiosity to a fully established Nordstrom-stocked operation, the “emerging designer” name tag stuck to Eckhaus Latta—but their collections, they realized, are no longer surprising. They’re not meant to be. "We're not a new brand anymore,” Mike said. Instead, they’ve been in the lab cooking up novel ways to grow the business: “How do we expand in a way that doesn't feel regurgitative of ideas that have been popular?”
The answer was in front of us: two racks of menswear, which stood next to two racks of womenswear. Every Eckhaus Latta show has included a handful of men’s looks, and the brand’s denim and lapped T-shirts have been available in men’s sizing for several years. But it was hard not to feel a little disoriented at first by the gender distinction, given that Eckhaus Latta has popularized so many of the post-gender ideas currently animating the most thrilling corners of the fashion world. Long before the industry caught on, the duo were championing non-binary models and androgynous clothing, which was embraced early on by adventurous dressers like Dev Hynes. (Rest assured: I was told they displayed the menswear separately for my benefit.)
“When we started the brand, I guarantee I had way more men's clothes than Mike, and Mike had way more women's clothes than me,” Zoe said. (These days, they are both most likely to be found wearing a pair of dyed or spray-painted Eckhaus Latta jeans.) “There was always this fluidity in dressing that we both really cherished.”
“I used to shop so much into the women's section,” Mike added later. “I still do, but not so much anymore. I have broad shoulders, and it's harder for me to wear women's clothing because I've started to care more about how clothes fit me.”
After years of avoiding gender distinctions in their collections, the designers realized introducing menswear was more a practical decision than a philosophical one—that, paradoxically, it would make the brand vastly more inclusive. “It's not about something being traditionally masculine or traditionally feminine, but also about our proportions,” Mike said. “Menswear” is a bit of a misnomer, since the expanded collection designed to showcase a new focus on proportions and cut, rather than an entirely new point of view. “If you're a guy and you're shopping Eckhaus Latta, we tend to cut really tight little stretchy tops. And if you can't fit into a large or extra-large, you just can't fit into it,” Mike said. “As we’ve become more developed and more conscientious, and care more about the fit and the construction of the garments, there are realities that come along with that. And having something that felt more specific to a man's anatomy was important on that level.”
Unlike many of their fellow culturally-fluent designers, Mike and Zoe don’t ground their collections in direct sources of inspiration. Instead, like painters or ceramicists, they layer new ideas on their past work and revel in the interplay of form and color. So for men—myself included—who have longed for one of Eckhaus Latta’s gloriously funky knits or a piece of their achingly cool tailoring, the fall collection, which iterates on and refines some of the brand’s strongest silhouettes, is an answered prayer. Come fall, men will be able to slip into a pink lurex T-shirt, a pair of groovy flared trousers, and a rectangular ribbed sweater vest, as well as several perfectly-boxy four-button blazers and an oversized, raw-edged Japanese nylon trench coat—the strongest piece of outerwear Eckhaus Latta has shown to date—that reveals a newfound technical confidence.
“Each piece has sort of a boyfriend and a girlfriend version,” Mike said. “Which is not to say that men are not allowed to shop on the women's racks anymore,” he clarified. “In terms of the gender divide, it really is only for the market that we define it,” Zoe added.
After so many years of keeping menswear at arm’s length, I asked, why take a creative and financial risk now? It turns out—duh!—that men want what they can’t have. “We have a really solid men's customer,” Mike told me, a customer who has basically exhausted the existing unisex denim and T-shirt options. “We’ve seen more and more [interest from men] on a sales level, and even just going on Instagram—something like 54% of our followers are women, and 46% are men.”
“It really came from a place of wanting to offer men more than jeans and tee shirts and the occasional suiting element,” Zoe said. “We wanted to give people options because at the end of the day, that's why we're making the clothes, and what we like about our customer is how people assimilate our messaging into their own reality.”
The new approach has already advanced their goal of making the brand more accessible (and, of course, more salable). In one of the fashion world’s abiding mysteries, the men’s market season concludes before the women’s fashion shows are held, meaning Eckhaus Latta’s stores placed their orders for the new collection last month. And according to Zoe, every single account—even those focused on either menswear or womenswear—ordered clothes from both the men’s and women’s collections.
Brands that are deeply embedded in the art world have historically (and some may say rightfully) shied away from playing by the fashion industry’s rules. Eckhaus Latta has spent plenty of time subverting the industry from within, like when they released a “traditional” ad campaign that featured couples boning, or when they set up a shoppable exhibition at the Whitney Museum that led the viewer to confront the collapsing boundaries between high art, fashion design, and commerce. But after an unbroken stretch of steady year-over-year growth and expansion into the Japanese and South Korean markets, the most radical move for the brand might lie in becoming a viable, long-term business rather than a scrappy outsider operation.
But despite an unprecedented flourishing of talent at the margins of the fashion establishment, the paths to grow a small brand are limited. Eckhaus Latta’s push into menswear follows an unsuccessful search for a partner to help the business scale. (A buzzy partnership with UGG injected capital for a while, but ended last season.) “Things feel really good right now, and adding someone else's wealth in order to fulfill some other expectation that's kind of more market-driven is not what we want to do. But at the same time, riding on this nice escalator uphill is not safe. And once the escalator gets a little bit higher, there are bigger risks,” Zoe said, noting that they originally launched the brand with Opening Ceremony, the downtown retail stalwart that’s set to close its doors for good this spring.
Eckhaus Latta’s show—which packed the old Abercrombie to the gills for ten minutes of aggressive elegance, and included a footwear partnership with The Real Real and a show note poem that mentioned “SPACIAL EXCITEMENT” and “THOSE BUBBLES OF AIR THEY PUT IN SNEAKERS”—proved that they are not going conservative to find a mass audience anytime soon. But the expanded collection reflects a hard-edged determination that will extend to other aspects of the business. “We really don't like going backwards,” Zoe said, hinting that big changes involving new categories—bags? footwear?—were coming. Mike added that, menswear aside, he and Zoe had been thinking about their position in the new era of fashion, where the next Eckhaus Lattas are bubbling up faster than ever. “It’s something we are constantly considering, the fact that it's easy to do really loud, crazy clothing. And I feel like it's more of this challenge constantly to be like, ‘What is something that's nuanced and compelling and feels unique to us, that isn't just like cool, crazy art school kids?’ We're growing and kind of longing to feel, not more mature, but more considered in our ideas.”
Originally Appeared on GQ
