Migration stories

With his second collection at Paris Fashion Week—his fourth to date—Ehud Joseph has shown his strength as a designer, writes Sopheak Seng

ORIGINALLY from a fine arts’ background, Ehud Joseph graduated in 2006 from the MA programme at Central Saint Martin’s, London. He then worked for a variety of labels and taught before relaunching his own eponymous label in 2009.

This was not his first foray into menswear. Long-time readers will remember Lucire covering Joseph’s designs in the late 1990s, and even his work on a 2001 shoot in Wellington. Since then, his travels have taken him on a very different path, with the menswear collections in Paris hopefully now a regular occurrence on his calendar.

For his spring 2012 collection, Joseph continued to explore the use of clothing as uniform and how they shape the wearer. For this season, the ideas of migration, how we change and adapt to suit circumstances, and how we protect ourselves and change within our surrounding environments were prevalent. He may have used own story (Joseph grew up in Israel, migrated to New Zealand, moved to London, and is now based in Amsterdam) as inspiration.

Through this migration story of alienation, protection, survival and reinvention, traditional menswear codes are challenged, refashioned and subversed into modern silhouettes. Single-breasted jackets have a double-breasted layer on top giving a trompe-l’œil effect of wearing two jackets, while a heavy cotton suit is spliced with sheer nylon deconstruction and traditional tailoring, softening hard design lines.

Treated cottons and nylons give a sport-luxe effect to the suiting, adding a dimension of the street to a collection with such strong tailoring. A bright colour palette of harsh highlighter yellow, cerulean blue and bright fuchsia (inspired by the territorial markings of graffiti artists) is mixed with gritty concrete greys, road-marking whites and harsh black, making the collection wearble while commercially viable.

Stand-out pieces from the collection are the mandarin-collar wrap biker jackets, the yellow trench coat and the digital graphic prints that featured on T-shirts. Pieces are designed to question the notion of personal reinvention, cultural norms and expectances. Fashion that is not only wearable but also art. •

Sopheak Seng is fashion editor of Lucire.