Guys in Skirts Is Only The Start—The Menswear Revolution Is Just Beginning

It’s fair to say the beginning of the 2010s was not menswear’s golden age: drop-crotch pants were a thing and the big conversation in the business was tragic. Its chief subject was the financial downturn of 2008 and 2009, which not only sparked a general malaise across the luxury industry but also created a category-specific problem for menswear specialists. All those subprime layoffs had wiped out the spending power of a considerable constituency of consumers and sparked the first wave of this decade’s ongoing agonizing about the future of the suit. On the runways, though, we were seeing other much more scintillating flashes of wearable rhetoric—some of which would prefigure this about-to-pass decade’s transformation of menswear. The menswear season of Spring 2010 (which went unreviewed by Style.com!) was another era; we still had Alexander McQueen, Stefano Pilati was at YSL, Gianfranco Ferré showed, Kris Van Assche was doing loose (huh?) monochromatic suiting at Dior Homme, John Galliano was at John Galliano in his full creative pomp, Kim Jones was showing suits at Dunhill, and Frida Giannini’s Gucci was as lavishly conventional as Michele’s is now lavishly the opposite. And while there were certain fixed points that still remain—Giorgio Armani, Veronique Nichanian at Hermes, Yohji Yamamoto, Dolce & Gabbana, Paul Smith, Versace—the house whose progress between the show season of S10 and S20 that most encapsulates the alterations menswear as a whole has gone through is Louis Vuitton. Read more at Vogue.