New York Fashion Week: It’s true Brit at Rag & Bone’s menswear show

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The women’s side of the collection, which was presented in a separate runway show, may have been ‘chalet chic meets the street,’ but the Rag & Bone menswear was cool Brittania all the way.

With inspirations that included English gamekeepers, Scottish game hunters and the Duke of Windsor (a perennial touchstone of men’s fashion), and a color palette that included hunter green, sky blue and a riot of plaids, the design duo of Marcus Wainwright and David Neville tapped into the British invasion of the fall-winter 2011 menswear collections that we started to see at the European shows in January (Yves Saint Laurent in particular comes to mind).

That meant tartan Lowland blazers, moss green windowpane tweed Highland blazers, kilts (with the occasional sporran) herringbone vests, Oxford button-down shirts and hobnail boots.

There’s perhaps no piece of headgear more quintessentially English than the bowler hat, and there were
plenty of felt bowlers on hand (make that head) in a range of colors including blue, red, ivory, rust and beige.

But the inspiration wasn’t purely plucked from across the pond, the collection included some touches of classic Americana as well, such as varsity jackets and swirling varsity letter appliques (the swirling letters ‘R’ and ‘B,’ awarded, one can assume, for lettering in runway) and trousers and blazers in the blanket-weight wool we’ve come to associate with the American West in general (and Pendleton in particular).

Oh, did we mention there were also toggle button coats? Given the number of toggle closures and horn-shaped buttons we’ve seen since the shows started in mid-January, if there was such a thing as toggle futures, an early investor might expect to have buttoned up a tidy profit by the time fall 2011 rolls around.

-- Adam Tschorn in New York