Fashion
Classics Just Twisted Enough to Wear
A little adjustment on a familiar garment can go a long way.
Hang around the fashion industry for all of, oh, five minutes, and you’ll start to hear the term “classics with a twist.”
Designers say it, writers use it, marketing execs cite it. What they mean, typically, is something familiar, bent just enough to feel fresh — stylistically, and, of course, commercially.
Is it trite? Certainly. But I’ve been thinking about this cliché in recent days, as it applies so well to the best of what I’ve seen trudging through Paris Fashion Week: the clothes and outfits that contort the conventional just enough to make me lean in and say, “What’s going on there … and do I need it?”
It’s what I thought of when I saw the Yankees hat that Sigurd Bank, a forthright Dane who designs Mfpen, a Copenhagen label, was wearing when we met for coffee on Friday morning.
The hat looked like a kindergarten art project set upon by a hammerhead. Its faded brim was cleaved in half, a logo on the side had been stitched over by his daughter and the “NY” logo on the front had been covered with a swatch of plaid fabric held on by a safety pin.
He wasn’t taking a shot at New York in particular, but he did mention that there was “kind of an anti-U.S. thing going on in Europe” that compelled him to make his hat look less American.
