Opening Ceremony

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A good idea has the property of seeming self-evident, once it's presented to you. Consider, for instance, Opening Ceremony's riff on the concert tee, in its latest menswear collection: Rather than the usual rock, pop, or hip-hop names you'd expect to see splayed out on the apparel, OC honchos Humberto Leon and Carol Lim paid homage to classical music, name-checking the likes of Beethoven and Bach. The effect was a little silly, at first, and then it wasn't silly at all. Why shouldn't fans of the Romantic and Baroque eras indulge in a little logomania? This is the 21st century. Everything's up for grabs.

The classical music theme was the most overt at OC this season, but it was really just a flourish, one of several elaborating the collection's real organizing principle, which was its contemplation of the adolescent male bedroom. The sturdy young man staples were all present and accounted for, albeit in variously upgraded forms—the ribbed tank and pocket tee, made over as a knit; the button-down, executed in refined sport-mesh or shape-shifted into a pinstriped anorak. Khakis, meanwhile, were reinterpreted as super-voluminous, wide-leg pants, or long pleated shorts that Leon explained were inspired by the big boxer shorts he'd noticed were popular among teenage male models. Despite the emphasis on oversizing, and the adolescent referent, the collection wasn't sloppy—rather, Lim and Leon got at the shambolic-ness of adolescence by introducing psychedelic print and pattern. Somewhere out there, there's a kid getting stoned listening to "The Well-Tempered Clavichord," and this OC collection was tailor-made for him.

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