Style tribes

Four style tribes

Designer fashion is less one world than several that barely speak to each other. Each has its own idea of what makes a piece worth the money, and once you know the idea, you can read the clothes.

Quiet luxury: the fabric is the point

The idea: no logo, no announcement, and the money goes into cloth and fit.

The story that best sums up the mood is Brunello Cucinelli’s. He started in 1978, Wallpaper* reports, by buying a batch of cashmere, dyeing it in bold colours and making half a dozen sweaters, and later restored the village of Solomeo as his company’s home. In New York, InStyle traces The Row to 2006, when Ashley Olsen set out to make the perfect white T-shirt, with Mary-Kate Olsen as co-founder. The label is known for putting fit and fabric above everything else.

The term itself is a label applied from outside. Asked about it in 2024, Loro Piana’s then chief executive Damien Bertrand told La Conceria: “if quiet means quiet, I don’t believe it’s the right word for us.” It’s a fair point, since these clothes are recognised instantly by the people they’re meant to be recognised by.

What to look for: hand-feel, drape and proportion. Colour stays within a narrow range of neutrals, which in Spendrobe also means a safe harmony bonus.

Dark luxury and the avant-garde: the idea is the point

The idea: clothes as an argument about the body, about beauty and about fashion itself.

Rei Kawakubo and Yohji Yamamoto

A good place to start is Paris in 1981. Britannica records that Rei Kawakubo, self-taught, who had founded Comme des Garçons in Tokyo in 1969, and Yohji Yamamoto debuted separate collections there that year and shocked the critics. The V&A notes that Yamamoto, who launched his brand in Japan in 1972, came to international acclaim after that first Paris showing. Its collection holds a 1995 coat of his in black wool, cut in the style of a European bustle dress of the 1880s, with a red organza bustle: a good picture of how this tradition works. Kawakubo was the subject of the Metropolitan Museum’s 2017 exhibition Art of the In-Between.

Martin Margiela

Margiela trained at the Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp and assisted Jean Paul Gaultier from 1984 to 1987, according to the Centre for Fashion Curation’s record. The house he founded with Jenny Meirens in Paris in 1988 made anonymity into a method. Margiela gave no interviews, and the clothes carried a plain white label with no name, held on by what The Irish Times called “four white stitches”, the opposite of 1980s logo mania. He resigned in 2009. The Palais Galliera’s 2018 retrospective was the first in Paris devoted to him.

Rick Owens

Owens is originally from Southern California, and the CFDA says he started his label in the early nineties on the decayed end of Hollywood Boulevard, moving to Paris in 2003 after becoming artistic director of the fur house Revillon. FashionUnited, reporting on Temple of Love, his first French retrospective at the Palais Galliera, describes unisex, ultra-fitted clothing, exaggerated shoulders and platform boots, mostly in black and grey, with a taste for architectural brutalism.

What to look for: the cut before anything else. Asymmetry, odd proportions and a dark palette are all signals, but the question is whether the shape has been truly thought through. In Spendrobe, resist assuming the wildest piece is the priciest. Sometimes it is, and sometimes it’s the leather jacket beside it.

Streetwear: the drop is the point

The idea: value comes from belonging and from scarcity as much as from materials.

Supreme’s first shop opened in April 1994 in a former office on Lafayette Street in Lower Manhattan, founded by James Jebbia. The modern high point of the crossover came through Virgil Abloh. Britannica records that he started Off-White in 2013 and in 2018 was named creative director of Louis Vuitton menswear, the first person of colour in that position. He compared his approach to hip-hop sampling and to Duchamp’s ready-mades, which is the clearest statement of what the tribe believes: context can make the value. The Brooklyn Museum’s survey of his work, Figures of Speech, ran from July 2022 to January 2023.

What to look for: graphic idea, collaboration and how limited the run is. Materials can be ordinary, and that’s part of the argument. In the game, a logo tee can surprise you in either direction, so look at what else is in the line.

Tailoring: the fit is the point

The idea: a garment shaped for a body, by hand, over time.

The reference point is Savile Row, where the Savile Row Bespoke Association describes a suit drafted from an individual paper pattern, with an average of fifty hours’ work, three intermediate fittings and about three months from commission to finish. Naples answered with the opposite temperament: no shoulder padding, minimal lining and a sleeve set like a shirt’s, a style that developed as a reaction to the structure of Savile Row.

What to look for: how the collar sits against the neck, how the shoulder meets the sleeve, and how the cloth behaves when you move. Note that Spendrobe can only rank items with a listed price, and a bespoke suit is commissioned, not listed.

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