Ensemble

Avant-garde British fashion is often characterized by paradox. On the one hand, the various practitioners are deeply rooted in the aesthetic and technical traditions of their sartorial history. On the other, their citations of the past are inflected by a deliberate irreverence, alarming transpositions, or an ironic and transgressive interpretation of that history. Emerging designer Felix Chabluk Smith, who works in the context of the most codified forms of Savile Row menswear, introduces through explicit allusion some of the splendid details of historical British dress. The basis of this ensemble is a sumptuous brocade derived from an original pattern by renowned eighteenth-century textile master Anna Maria Garthwaite. To that historical precedent Chabluk Smith has added a series of details that inform his eccentric proposal for contemporary
menswear. The jacket’s sleeves, with their rounded fullness at the elbow, recall midnineteenth- century tailoring, which itself alluded to Tudor and Elizabethan dress, while the petticoat breeches—kiltlike, but with the propriety of pants—refer to a brief vogue in seventeenth-century masculine dress. Like the earlier sacred monsters of contemporary British fashion—Vivienne Westwood, John Galliano, and Alexander McQueen—Chabluk Smith mines the past with the disruptive strategies of the present.