“I’m in love with a German film star I once saw in a bar. Sitting in a corner in imperfect clothes, trying not to pose, for the cameras and the girls. It’s a glamorous world.” The Passions’ song made such a perfect soundtrack for this excellent Boss collection that Michel Gaubert spun it twice, placing a name-checking sliver of John Peel between the classic studio original and a higher-tempo, later recording. On the runway Marco Falcioni delivered an adjacent production, updating classic big ’80s Hugo Boss sartorialism for those who want to inhabit a glamorous world in a new way today.
Backstage Falcioni explained that he had been looking at the company’s ’80s and ’90s catalogues, in which lavish full looks were assembled with accessories then laid flat and photographed from above for buyers and connoisseurs. “I found that so romantic for being so time-consuming. In a period where we consume time, I would like time to consume us, right?” Falcioni was enchanted by the thought of creating a collection of garments to inspire contemporary recreational agonising—and set about doing it.
Falcioni placed recontextualised late-20th-century tailoring against outdoorsy and (especially in womenswear) equestrian counterpoints. There were many deliciously out-of-time pieces, including shoulder-patched quarter zips, boxily narrow ’90s three-button sack suits, horizontally pumped ’80s double-breasted power suits, windcheaters, and minimally detailed Tyrolean jackets. These were painstakingly styled: Suit pants were tucked into loafer-upper rig boots and leather blousons into those double-belt pants. Womenswear generally followed a masculine tailored template, often with cowl-neck knits and cotton tops instead of shirting and, near the end, breaking into lush velvets.
The designer contacted some of Boss’s historic suppliers to make new orders of archive-pattern paisley silks for ties, pocket squares, cravats, and linings. These, along with striped tailoring sleeve linings, were applied for their original purpose but also cut into the back and arms of knits and the body of some outerwear pieces to lend a sense of traditionalism turned inside out. Offcut material from these details—and more offcuts from the many leather looks patterned after ostrich or textured after pony skin—were shaped into boutonnieres. These details signalled that this was a collection designed for those who relish analysing the roll of a lapel or break of a pant. Highly stylised and lavishly heaped with detail, it was a bracing attempt to renew a habit of dressing meticulously in order to refine identity that now seems sadly anachronistic, but which needn’t be.
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