Milan: Giorgio Armani Men's Spring 2010

Demeulemeester's Male Retrospective

Amid the excitement of Paris' spring/summer '10 menswear runways this week, Ann Demeulemeester's show is set to be a singularly impressive event. In recent years, many discerning tastemakers have fallen for the Belgian design maestro's brooding take on men's fashion, and her exquisite work only gets better with time. Among her many loyal fans is Erik Madigan Heck, editor in chief of Nomenus Quarterly, who recently produced an exhilarating retrospective editorial featuring pieces of Demeuleumeester's menswear designs from 1996 up to her current 2009 season.

The editorial is an ode to the "quintessential Ann Demeulemeester man," according to Heck. The visually stunning spread reinterprets the survivalist interactions of schoolboys on a deserted island from William Golding's Lord of the Flies as well as the Catholic priests pervasive in Italian photographer Mario Giacomelli's work. For the shoot, Heck assembled 12 male models who he thought represented the Demeulemeester male archetype and photographed them playfully frolicking about Morningside Park, New York. "I was trying to capture this innocent male, who was playing and dissecting the hierarchy of adulthood, but relishing the hierarchies of almost teenage angst," explains Heck.

Of his impulse to delve deeper into the designer's psyche, Heck elaborates: "We know Ann Demeulemeester publicly more for her women, and her [friendly] relationship with Patti Smith, etc., but I felt like her 'Man' was never really explored deeply in the public eye."

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Biotin and Hair Loss

Biotin plays an important role in the prevention of hair loss. According to nutritionists biotin is an important vitamin for hair growth. Deficiency of biotin may cause unhealthy and breakage of hair, which might finally lead to hair loss. Biotin is an important component not only to new hair growth but also keeps the skin and nails in perfect health.

Try to avoid raw eggs in your diet since the high amount of protein contained in raw egg binds biotin and makes it non-available to the body which in turn causes deficiency of biotin and hair loss. Always use shampoo, which is enriched with biotin and silica for preventing hair loss.

Supplements are necessary to restore B12 levels, which will completely prevent hair loss. Since Biotin and hair loss are closely related, it is highly advisable to include biotin regularly in your food. Food containing a lot of biotin are egg yolks and liver. You would have to consume thousands of calories daily to get what your hair needs. If you are experiencing significant hair loss, taking biotin supplements is a good idea.

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DID YOU KNOW?
People with blood type A don’t have the ability to absorb B vitamins. As we already know Biotin, a family member of Vitamin B, is required for hair growth. Adding high doses of 5—8 grams to your food twice daily will prevent hair loss extensively. No side effects are known.

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Biotin and hair loss are closely related. So good food full of biotin include brewer’s yeast, green peas, oats, soybeans, walnuts, sunflower seeds, green peas, bulgar and brown rice may definitely help to prevent hair loss.

You should be aware that persons with heartburn, acid reflux, or GERD that are taking antacids may absorb biotin less and hair loss may definitely occur. So avoid over-the-counter medications of antacids for better assimilation of Biotin and hair loss prevention.

Biotin is hair food! If you suffer from hair loss I highly recommend taking a biotin supplement and using topical biotin enriched products like these. It is also highly advisable to take biotin in addition to other medical treatments such Minoxidil, Procapil or Propecia. A good topical treatment product in this category is Agent.

Look: Chad White for Gant (s/s 09)

Jack Spade Waxwear Flat Utility Bag

Whether you're carrying a few magazines, a design portfolio, various legal papers relating to your buddy's criminal case, or just a simple laptop, there's a lot to like in the Jack Spade Waxwear Flat Utility Bag ($425). Made from paraffin-soaked woven cotton, this waterproofed bag offers interior organizing pockets, an exterior zippered pocket, riveted chocolate bridle leather handles and trim, and striped suit lining.

“Perfectly suited for everyday work or school use, this Jack Spade bag includes a zip closure main compartment, two interior slip pockets, and a large zip pocket for optimal organization. The Utility bag also features two exterior expandable pockets and a detachable shoulder strap.

Profile: Peak Performance

Already a slope-side wardrobe staple for ski nuts and a fairway favourite with golfers, Swedish brand Peak Performance is now aiming for the casualwear market.

Waiting in the wings for spring 10 is Supreme, a premium sub-brand that Peak Performance is launching to tempt the UK’s premium retailers. With 13 styles for men and 15 for women, Supreme has a luxury handwriting exemplified by its use of top-end fabrics including Japanese Kaihara denim and cashmere and silk knits.

“We want to seed the collection into the country’s top accounts, giving the brand a halo effect that will hopefully drive sales of the main casualwear collection,” says Simon Walker, Peak Performance’s country manager for the UK and Republic of Ireland.

Walker says the brand will be sold into a mix of premium independent boutiques and department stores. He has a very specific list of targets, but remains tight-lipped for now.

Walker’s understanding of both the premium and lifestyle markets is intimate, having joined Peak Performance in 2007 from the J Lindeberg brand, where he was country manager. Previously, he was country manager at footwear brand Timberland and general manager at premium label Calvin Klein.

“When I started two years ago the business [Peak Performance] was weighted towards winter sports and skiwear, which then represented 75% of the sales,” Walker explains. “The challenge was to build the golf collection and its distribution so that it picked up the sales momentum in spring, with the outdoor collection building on those sales through the summer, and for the main casualwear collection to be selling consistently throughout the year.”

The skiwear collection now represents 60% of the brand’s UK sales, with Walker’s team having made significant inroads into the golf market. The plan for the next two seasons is to make enough of an impact in the casualwear sector so that ski and golf contribute 35% each, and casualwear 30%.

Launched in 1986 by a pair of Swedish ski enthusiasts, Peak Performance has grown into an international brand with four deliveries annually. Prices for the mainline range from
£17 to £135, while the Supreme collection will be priced roughly 30% higher, with T-shirts from £25 and jackets up
to £135.

“Peak Performance is big in ski and golf wear, but in casualwear we’re anony­mous,” Walker admits. “We now need to communicate our reputation to the industry and prove how market relevant we are.”

Fast Facts

1986 Year Peak Performance was launched
1,600 Number of styles across all categories for spring 10

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The All-American Back From Japan

As you have surely noticed, all- American preppy style has come back for another go-round. There is madras everything, button-downs everywhere. Nantucket reds — washed-out pink pants — are the new khakis; Sperry Top-Siders are more common on roof decks than top decks; and the Polo pony and the Lacoste crocodile are now but two of the critters in a zoo of polo shirt insignia.

Lately the trend has taken on a new dimension, via the Internet, with a resurgence of interest in once obscure American brands. Alongside the familiar L. L. Bean duck boots, Brooks Brothers shirts and Ray-Ban Wayfarers, there are Filson duffel bags, Gokey boots, Alden dress shoes, Gitman oxford shirts, Quoddy Trail moccasins, Wm. J. Mills canvas totes — to name but a few. Moribund brands like Southwick and Woolrich are being revived with new designs. And the old-school look has been furthered by popular American fashion labels — small houses like Thom Browne, Band of Outsiders and Benjamin Bixby along with megabrands like J. Crew and Ralph Lauren.

As fashion moments go, this is as all-American as it gets, right?

Actually, no. What makes today’s prepidemic so fascinating is how it is, surprisingly enough, so Japanese. The look has its roots in the United States, to be sure. But the spirit, rigor and execution of today’s prep moment is as Japanese as Sony. One need only flip through the intriguing Japanese book “Take Ivy,” a collection of photographs taken in 1965 by Teruyoshi Hayashida on Eastern college campuses, to get the drift.


“Take Ivy” has always been extremely rare in the United States, a treasure of fashion insiders that can fetch more than $1,000 on eBay and in vintage-book stores. But scanned images from the book have been turning up online in recent months. Ricocheting around the network of sartorially obsessed Web sites and blogs (like acontinuouslean.com and thetrad .blogspot.com), it has aroused renewed interest for its apparent prescience of preppy style. (In the United States, the word preppy came into popular use only in 1970, thanks to the best-selling book and top-grossing movie “Love Story”; and the full flowering of preppy style would not arrive until 1980 with the best-selling “Official Preppy Handbook.”)

But “Take Ivy” was not prescient; it was totally timely, having been commissioned by Kensuke Ishizu, who was the founder of Van Jacket, an Ivy Leagueobsessed clothing line that was a sensation among Japanese teenagers and young men in the early 1960s. Mr. Ishizu was a kind of Ralph Lauren avant la lettre.

“You could have called it a Van look,” recalled Daiki Suzuki, the designer and founder of Engineered Garments (channeling vintage workwear) and the designer of the revamped Woolrich Woolen Mills line (channeling 1950s New England). He remembers “Take Ivy” from his childhood in Japan and how the Ivy look, as it is generally called there, became basic in the ’70s and ’80s, as the craze for American things like Levi’s and Red Wing boots accelerated. In 1989, Mr. Suzuki moved to the United States to work for a large Japanese store scouting for new American designers and obscure brands to import, like White’s Boots from Washington, Russell Moccasin from Wisconsin and Duluth Pack backpacks from Minnesota.

“It’s funny — this authentic Americana, people in the States didn’t care about it at all,” Mr. Suzuki said. “But I would take it back, and everybody would say, ‘Wow, this is really great, what is this?’ Now it’s different. People here like it now.”

HE would know. In 1999, once the Internet began eroding the specialness of his small “Made in the USA” finds, he founded Engineered Garments with the idea of updating vintage American pieces for modern tastes, and for five years he sold the line only in Japan. In the last couple of years Americans have come around, and now the line is a hot seller at Barneys New York.

As curious as this American-export style of business sounds, it is not unusual. Post Overalls, a Japanese- owned line based (and made) in America since 1993, started selling here only this spring. J. Press, the venerable Ivy League clothier founded in New Haven in 1902 and bought by the Japanese fashion giant Kashiyama in 1986, has four modest stores in this country — in Cambridge, Mass.; New Haven; New York; and Washington — but sells roughly six times as much as American made J. Press merchandise in Japan at department stores like Isetan.

The Japanese penchant for Americana is not merely a story of economics; it is a matter of style. It has not been unusual for Japanese men to wear the Ivy look in head-to-toe extremes once unthinkable here — say, a blazer, tie, plaid shorts and knee socks. But given the zeal for American designers like Thom Browne and Scott Sternberg of Band of Outsiders, who tinker with old-fashioned Americana (and whose lines are made in the United States and are very popular in Japan), extremism is finally becoming fashionable here. A column in this month’s GQ by a to-the-boatshoe- born Cape Codder even inveighs against the trend, labeling it a case of arrivistes going overboard. But whose Ivy look has the more valid claim?

Mr. Suzuki remembers the first time he met Mr. Browne, when they were both starting their lines. “He was wearing a gray suit, button-down shirt, tie, cashmere cardigan and wingtips,” he recalled. “I remember thinking, ‘I’ve never seen an American dress in such Japanese style.’” Mr. Browne is flattered. “It’s amazing,” he said. “The Japanese get the whole perfect American thing better than Americans. They understand that it’s an identifiable style around the world, this American look. We think we appreciate it, but we really don’t, not like they do.”

But that’s changing. Not long ago, men scoffed at dress shorts, let alone wore them to work. Now, they are a summer norm, along with seersucker suits, ribbon belts and horn-rimmed glasses. While some men still prefer it low-key — plain boat shoes, a faded Lacoste shirt with jeans or a khaki suit with a madras tie — even full-on Japanese prep — blue blazer, button-down, bermudas, loafers — can look good if you have the attitude to carry it off.

As fascinating and confusing as this cross-pollination is, the story of ostensible outsiders borrowing from and bettering the holy tartan has an august history. Brooks Brothers, the country’s oldest operating men’s clothier, and the venerable Ray-Ban brand are owned by the Italian Del Vecchio family. Erich Segal, the author of “Love Story,” and Lisa Birnbach, who put together “The Official Preppy Handbook,” are Jewish, as is Scott Sternberg of Band of Outsiders (who this week won the Council of Fashion Designers of America award for men’s wear, in a tie) and, of course, the look’s most famous exponent, Ralph Lauren. And, by the way, those two most prep fabrics, gingham and seersucker, came to the United States, via Britain, from India.

André Benjamin, a k a André 3000, the designer of the bright Ivy-inspired Benjamin Bixby line (perhaps the only celebrity line with a truly fresh viewpoint), grew up in Atlanta amid the preppy boom of the ’80s and early ’90s. He remembers how schoolmates spent their money on clothes and cars, wearing two or three polo shirts at a time and fetishizing prepmobiles like the Volkswagen Cabriolet.

“I can’t speak for how it’s been taken up in Asian community,” he said, “but in the black community, you’re always striving to rise above. Most black kids don’t even go to college, and you just hope you can will yourself to get there.

“Like a lot of things, the myth is greater than the actual thing. The WASPy lifestyle, with the parents and traditions, it looks great, but appreciating it from the outside brings a whole different perspective. Ralph didn’t come from it, either. It’s all about having your own twist.”

To Mr. Benjamin, the most appealing part of the old prep look was not its WASPiness but its suggestion of an easy, well-dressed freedom from anxiety, the same entitled naïveté of Oliver Barrett IV, the WASPy Romeo of “Love Story.”

“This golden age of Ivy League style we’re talking about — the blue blazers, the chinos, the sweatshirts, the tweed jackets — what I like is that it’s a look without looking like you thought about it. It looks like you care, but you don’t care.”

Of course, as one of the world’s best and most colorfully dressed men, Mr. Benjamin cares deeply, and it shows in his clothes, as it does in all the new prep gear. And so what if it does? It may not be true of love, but as any boarding-school student can tell you, preppy means never having to say you’re sorry.

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