J.L-A.L SS27
Continues to Reimagine the Familiar
Writer: Anya Duncan
Images By: Ines Bahr
J.L-A.L sent its audience spiralling beneath the city for SS27, into a concrete pit beneath the earth, where sweeping lines carved through the space. Slowly, deliberately, each model emerged to prowl across the room, their silhouettes drawing on the familiar language of classic British clothing while subtly pulling it apart.
Each collection from J.L-A.L explores reimagined garments from the designer’s evolving archive, taking pieces from his self-produced history and expanding them through greater intricacy, technical fabrication and experimentation. This season, that process was rooted in topology, the mathematical study of surfaces, knots, deformation and invariants where familiar structures are loosened, redirected and reborn.
The result was a collection that felt both recognisable and slightly displaced. Brimmed hats sat above sand-coloured trench coats, while striped shirts appeared to emerge unpredictably from beneath other garments. Slouching bags softened more structured looks, while well-tailored suits, pleated shirts and classic raincoats reintroduced some of menswear’s most enduring archetypes.
But nothing remained entirely as expected.
Construction became a point of disruption. Belt loops extended into spirals, buttons redirected surfaces and finishing details twisted and knotted themselves into new forms. A thick rope belt plumed outward from one model’s hip, almost detaching itself from the stone-coloured trousers that fell loosely down the leg. Elsewhere, trailing shirt details extended away from the body, turning what might ordinarily be considered finishing touches into structural elements in their own right.
One of the more striking details came beneath a knitted jumper, where a similarly textured pair of cable-knit gloves emerged. They recalled the thick gloves of gardeners, practical and familiar, yet displaced from their usual setting. Elsewhere, heavier gloves brought to mind fencing gear, their presence suggesting an accessorised memory of gentlemen’s history, carried underground and reassembled into something less certain.
The collection repeatedly played with this relationship between the formal and the undone. Two looks a shirt and a long trench coat carried lacerations across the shoulders. From a distance, they appeared almost like near misses, marks collected in the heat of a duel. Their placement transformed the garments from pristine British staples into records of an imagined encounter.
The press release places the collection within an imagined retreat beyond the 1927 Solvay Conference, where pioneering physicists gathered to debate the nature of reality. That formal world provides a starting point for J.L-A.L, before being carried elsewhere: away from the conference room and towards a fictional leisure, inspired by the desaturated summer beach scenes of Alex Colville.
It is a strange but fitting setting for a collection concerned with deformation and shifting surfaces. The clothes feel as though they have travelled through several worlds before arriving in the concrete pit: from the British gentleman’s wardrobe, through the formal rooms of scientific history, and finally into an underground landscape where their original structures can be stretched and distorted.
Throughout, J.L-A.L maintains a sense of restraint. The experimentation is embedded within the clothes rather than announced through them. Technicality appears in the construction; disruption arrives through a misplaced button, a spiralling loop or a rope that refuses to sit quietly at the waist.
J.L-A.L also continues to use 3D development software to reduce sampling and material waste, allowing these ideas to be explored digitally before they are translated into physical garments. It is an approach that mirrors the collection’s wider interest in transformation. Familiar forms are not discarded, but altered, stretched and returned in another state.
By the time the final looks disappeared back into the underground, SS27 had made a case for looking at menswear’s history not as something fixed, but as material to be pulled apart and rearranged. Beneath the city, J.L-A.L found another way of making the familiar strange.
