“What we do every season is the alternative creative masculinity and this time the dresses were the first things we started with and built it from there,” said Per Götesson backstage. “This collection was about exploring drapery for a more grown-up man. This masculinity I’m trying to grasp is more inclusive and rooted in a queer place.”
The NEWGEN designer’s silhouettes flowed, not by use of material but through the clever cutting construction. Shoulders were pronounced and sleeves verged on puffball. Götesson’s signature denim pieces became sculptural yet still retaining their quintessentially Scandinavian functionalism, wrapping and trailing from the body with effortless ease as the models padded barefoot down the catwalk. SS20 came with an underlying, incredibly refined nomadism, coupled with an intrinsic excitement and eager urge to keep moving forward and exploring, which was gently reinforced by the soundtrack featuring Rusted Root’s coming of age ‘Send Me On My Way’ and a finale set to The Pet Shop Boys’ ‘Suburbia’.
Although looking forward threads of nostalgia were woven throughout the collection, these came in the form of old portraits of Götesson and his partner and ongoing jewellery collaborator Husam El Odeh that were rendered beaded and affixed to coats and light cotton tees. The jewellery this season took the form of shiny silver pieces made up of an array of quotidian objects, which hung around the models’ ankles, wrists and necks as well as decorating caps and brooches. “We had a birds nest at our house, so we were thinking about collecting, building and making things as an abstract idea that influenced the jewellery,” Götesson explains. The glints of silver throughout the collection would have caught the eye of any magpie and attendees alike.
Photographs by Jason Lloyd-Evans
