New York Fashion Week: Spurr is all saddled, ready to gallop

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- Simon Spurr is the sort of understated fellow who tends to get lost in the shuffle of New York Fashion Week. For the last few seasons he’s shown his menswear collection here, usually just lining the models up against the wall in some random Manhattan studio space for a few hours and letting journalists and buyers mill about.

By the time the week is through, over-the-top runway productions, live bands and celebrity spectacle have pulled focus from presentations like this (which are actually a better way to see men’s clothes since the details are key), which is too bad.

Even if you don’t recognize the name, you’ve probably seen his handiwork. Before launching the line that bears his name for Fall 2006 (he serves as creative director, his business partner and chief executive is Judd Nydes), Spurr served as design director for the Ralph Lauren Purple Label and Ralph Lauren Black Label Men’s from 2003 to 2006, and before that he was the senior designer at Calvin Klein’s ckmenswear from 2001-03 and prior to that (1998-2001) he worked under the tutelage of none other than Hedi Slimane on Saint Laurent, the diffusion line of the Yves Saint Laurent Rive Gauche.

This season Spurr said he was inspired by a host of things -- the late ‘60s, early ‘70s, vintage Helmut Newton photographs, David Bowie, Jimi Hendrix and manicured gardens among them -- and threw in a descriptor you don’t often hear in menswear these days: ‘romantic.’

The 20 looks on display had a certain confidence to them: double-breasted jackets (in white and navy), suits (a favorite was the salmon-colored wool/linen number), plae blue pinpoint tuxedo shirts, deerskin leather weekend bags (OK, that seems kind of like Hendrix to me) and a range of denim (that’s what he started with) including pipe-leg and wide-leg styles in white denim and blue selvedge.

With the potted trees as a backdrop it was easy to imagine the men in their Spurr ensembles at a garden party or a wedding reception not surprising, since Spurr told me that the next thing on his docket was getting married in just a few days.

Wedding vows aren’t all that’s making it a banner year for the designer; he’s also one of the 10 finalists for the 2009 CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund Award, and just this morning, fashion trade paper WWD (subscription required) reported that Tommy Fazio, men’s fashion director of Neiman Marcus (since June) and Bergdorf Goodman (since 2005) was resigning those posts to become president of the Spurr label effective Oct. 1.

‘With the right attention, time and people, I know Simon can be the next big America designer,’ Fazio told WWD.

-- Adam Tschorn

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