New York Fashion Week: Band of Outsiders’ runway return suffers by comparison
Reporting from New York — Let’s get one thing out of the way at the outset: comparing the Band of Outsiders label that came down the runway here Sept. 10 during New York Fashion Week to the one Scott Sternberg helmed until it shuttered in May of last year is like saying that “The Joy of Cooking” and “Mother Goose Nursery Rhymes” are sort of the same book because they both mention lamb.
It is true that CLCC SA, the Luxembourg-based fashion investment company backing the re-booted Band brand, owns the intellectual property of the label launched in 2004. And it’s also true that the names are nearly identical; the original was “Band of Outsiders” (an homage to Godard’s 1964 film “Bande à Part”) while the new one is “Band of Outsiders Los Angeles,” which officially appends the original label’s hometown (though the company is no longer based in L.A.) But where Sternberg seasoned his preppy aesthetic over the years with a sprinkling of eclectic inspirations that included Robert Altman films, René Magritte paintings and the occasional Atari video game, the new creative team seems to have “The Breakfast Club” on an endless loop.
That’s because the men’s and women’s offerings are presented as the class of spring/summer 2017, a band of misfits, underdogs and square-pegging round-holers symbolizing the archetypes served up so perfectly in John Hughes’ 1985 movie. While that’s hardly uncharted territory when it comes to presenting an apparel collection, what the trio of designers — Florian Feder, Niklaus Hodel and Matthias Weber, who studied together at Antwerp’s Royal Academy of Fine Arts – have tried to do is layer in the notion that these archetypes also stand in for the different neighborhoods of Los Angeles.
“If you look at Venice it’s completely different from Hollywood; if you go to Watts, it’s completely different,” Hodel explained backstage in advance of the runway show. “That’s why it’s such a good inspiration for us for the future [of the brand]. Only in a big city is it possible to have all these people in one classroom, one graduating class. You have the quarterback, you have the shy guy … in the end the inspiration comes from all these different characters.”
The designers would have been much better off (and, in reality, much closer in spirit to the original label it descended from) by simply creating a “Breakfast Club” collection and calling it a day. Instead, the debut Band of Outsiders Los Angeles collection got bogged down by trying to make sure the full range was sprinkled evenly with the kind of “preppy with a twist” pixie dust that defined its predecessor.
That meant varsity jackets with terrycloth-textured appliqué letters paired with slim-fitting black trousers (for men) or baggy, white, high-waisted athletic mesh shorts (for women); blue plaid shirtdresses, robes and baseball shirts for women and pinstriped pullover hoodies and striped bowling shirts for men. Grounded in a palette of navy blue, baby blue and white, the collection occasionally moved into shades of burgundy, beige or olive drab, and there were a few pops of peach and mustard yellow along the way. Many pieces had athletic influences (good news for the jock archetype if anyone’s keeping track), including dress and sweater silhouettes in athletic mesh and several versions of the tearaway track pants; and overall, the silhouettes were on the baggier side.
If you found yourself reading that last sentence and immediately making a mental comparison between the baggy, athletic silhouette of Band of Outsiders Los Angeles and the super-slim-fitting silhouettes of the original Band of Outsiders, you wouldn’t be the first one to do so. But the designers are eager to point out that while the name remains, the brand’s past incarnation is only a starting point.
“The brand has so many things you can draw on for inspiration,” Hodel said. “We felt that if we took it somewhere else [that would be] fine, but we didn’t want to copy someone else’s work, what he put his heart and soul into. We wouldn’t be able to do that. So it had to be something different.”
And that’s the big takeaway: As a label called Band of Outsiders, the spring/summer 2017 men’s and women’s collection falls flat, coming across as gimmicky nostalgia – akin to a poor-quality, black-and-white photocopy of one of the richly colored Polaroids that Sternberg used to feature in his advertising campaigns. But, as the debut New York Fashion Week collection by a trio of gents from Antwerp – without any of the back-story baggage – it showed at least some potential.
So here’s a suggestion: Just like Kentucky Fried Chicken tried to de-emphasize the whole frying thing by rebranding itself KFC, the re-launched Band of Outsiders Los Angeles might want to do itself a huge favor and simply tweak its name enough to escape the long shadow of its beloved namesake.
BOOLA, anyone?
For more musings on all things fashion and style, follow me @ARTschorn.
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