The Row
What exactly is The Row? Is it super luxe minimalism? A way to reference and recreate brands and styles that have long left the current lexicon. Just a way for rich shorties to make a uniform for themselves?
There’s an elegance to the clothes, and it’s doubly so in the way the garments are styled for collections each season. The muted color palette, the set repertoire of the garments presented, the lengths and shapes fabric is pulled into… looking at The Row, you see something that is committed to itself. It’s doubling down on it’s vision and trying to perfect the technique with which it’s executed.
My first thoughts whe looking at the clothes and how they’re presented take me to Margiela in the late 90’s early 2000’s and as well as the Hermes years that were being worked on by Martin Margiela.There are other things that you could guess inspired the work… Comme, Yohji, Ann D, Jil… all from that same era of time. There’s also the sentiment that The Row is sort of spiritual successor to the Phoebe Philo years of Celine, and I even like to think of the clothes being from the same cut of cloth as Lemaire, both with a different viewpoint.
I’m not sure if the distinction between women’s clothes and men’s clothes matter all that much here. What is clear is that the tailoring and how fabric is shaped on the body is something important to them, though the shapes they are going for really trick the eye and obscure how the body should be read. It isn’t just kinda baggy and flowy, but more sculpted. And a very soft sculpting at that. The threads have body without being consipcuously structured. A shirt might flow in a pant, the pants might flow into the show, and jacket may tie it all together and make it feel like a single garment. The layers are fun, and the clothes make the wearer look like a giant, but in an elegant way. (obviously models have a look to them, but I think this still checks out)












