By and large, the show notes at London Collections:Men have been surprisingly on-the-money, in terms of articulating the motivation behind each designer's collection. And Nasir Mazhar, as the final on-schedule show of the week, certainly seemed likely to follow suit with his concise eight-line statement.
The opening sentence promised Mazhar's 'notion of normal'; an intriguing proposition from a designer who's played so much with strangeness and subversive collisions in the past. But Mazhar's 'normal' was anything but normcore (a word that already seems to have disappeared into the mists of 2014); instead, it was a sharp, slick line-up of elements that coalesced into something approaching a complete wardrobe - zip-scarred tracksuits, hybrid coat/backpack garments, disco-glossy outerwear and body-hugging shirts and trousers. The inky blues and blacks, alternating with flashes of white, lime and grape, evoked Nazhar's familiar menacing swagger. But it was the gradual emergence of a secondary thread - one featuring theatrical cinched waists, lead-glass embossed patterning and sumptuous brocades - that unsettled any sense of 'normality', in the traditional sense. It made for an unexpected swerve in direction, and left the door wide open in terms of where Mazhar's aesthetic might go next. And it was fascinating to note that the last outfit, of the last show, on the last day of LC:M, was almost Elizabethan in its gilded formality; tightly fitted trousers teamed with a padded, sculpted top that shaped to the figure like a suit of armour. It came topped with one of Mazhar's trademark peaked caps, but was still a spectacularly out-of-time ending to the week - leaping past two centuries of Savile Row stiffness, to the proud peacock swagger of menswear's original Golden age.
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