How do you sell a woman a suit after two years of working from home? Offices are slowly reopening, and many of us are thinking about refreshing our 9-to-6 wardrobes. Still, the matching sets we’ve been wearing on our couches have been of the sweatsuit variety, not Italian wool. Phillip Lim has been thinking about the in-betweenness of our current moment. “We have to address the present, and use our creativity to offer solutions,” he said at a preview in his Great Jones Street store.
His solution for fall was to design modularly. Pulling a cropped cadet jacket in grey wool off the rack, he showed three different pairs of pants it worked with: an oversize Dickies-style, a carrot-shaped cut, and culottes. Even better, he said, if the carrot-shaped pants are black wool, or the culottes are black vegan leather. “I loosened up the suit, that feels realistic to the situation,” he continued. But he didn’t skimp on the finishings: you get designer-grade details at contemporary brand-prices at 3.1 Phillip Lim. For proof, see the collection’s two-tone proper English Mac. He’s emphasising versatility too: the mockneck sweater with geometric cut-outs that he showed with the suit can be worn front-to-back for a more office-ready look.
Lim left room for fun: you could wear those broken suits with faux snakeskin stack-heeled mules or gold-studded moccasin loafers, or you could go full Dorothy over-the-rainbow in crystallised platform mary-janes. Why not?
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