My fellow tinfoil hat-wearers already know that there is a not-so-shadowy cabal of cool, stylish dudes internationally dictating menswear’s doings. They may not tell you exactly how to dress but they are setting your pace, incidentally or not.
Exhibit A: Gauthier Borsarello, a well-connected French designer whose L’ETIQUETTE x ÉDIFICE collection is a jumping-off point for a larger consideration.
On a surface level, though, these are some pretty nice clothes.
ETS.MATERIAUX, an especially Francophile imprint of Japanese retailer ÉDIFICE, has created a collection of Japanese-made staples that stylistically pull cues from Borsarello’s massive archive of vintage clothing.
That means wool T-shirts inspired by Italian navy uniforms, a linen pullover like those once worn by French seamen, and the classic indigo-dyed chore coat.
Great garms, wearable and well-styled in the accompanying imagery. But we’re just getting started.
This collaboration, Borsarello’s second offering for Japanese multibrand store ÉDIFICE, is just that. But it’s also an interesting study of influence.
This guy is the fashion director of clothing magazine L’ETIQUETTE, creative director of 50-year-old French fashion house Fursac, curator of a vintage archive rich with age-old Americana, and on it goes. Busy fellow, sure, but one with enough time to occasionally guest on a menswear podcast.
Meanwhile, ETS.MATERIAUX is an extremely low-key Japanese label first envisioned by the eternally hustling Keiji Kaneko, an ÉDIFICE buyer turned perpetual fashion innovator.
Kaneko co-founded the hip boutique L’ECHOPPE, launched vintage-ish store BOUTIQUE, offers creative direction to labels as disparate (but still retro-minded) as chino brand NEAT and Tetsu Nishiyama’s DESCENDENT… I could go on. And that’s just to start!
Borsarello and Kaneko are not actually in any sort of menswear cabal. But they are indicative of the fancy-dressin’ dudes who exist in a higher plane of stylishness and thus set the tastes for the regular menswear dudes.
They do not gather in dark, smoky rooms to discuss the future of Harrington-style jackets and pleated slacks (probably). However, if anyone could decide those kinda things, it’d be them.
They’re all chummy, they swap gossip, they consult on clothes, they disseminate their taste across social media, they indirectly (or not) alter the direction of greater menswear happenings through that stuff and more. Their whims are singularly intriguing and collectively potent, often aligning to shape a bigger picture.
Borsarello, himself just a dude, makes up a greater wave of well-dressed workwear-y fellows alongside, say, Brut Archive and Wooden Sleepers. They don’t coordinate plans, necessarily, but they all help normalize Paraboot shoes and push beat-up denim jeans as an all-purpose uniform.
So, nothing nefarious here. This is the rare cool cabal.
But, back to L’ETIQUETTE x ÉDIFICE. It ain’t gonna change the world. Most people will never know it exists. It’s instead something to admire from afar, a cross-cultural handshake and ultra-insider-y menswear collection made for nerds, by nerds — who just so happen to influence how those other nerds look at clothes.
