Ports 1961 Spring/Summer 2016 Menswear

Many have tried to co-opt elements of surf and skate culture into luxury apparel. Invariably, though, the distance between the two proves too much to bridge and the results wear like Gleaming the Cube was to watch. This Ports 1961 proposition, though, wasn’t a million miles away from landing it. Tony Alva’s decks and boards—which some of the models carried when this collection was presented in Piazza Ognissanti at Pitti—provided mood music for an eclectic and sometimes highly desirable suite of clothes. Rather than surf-ploitation, this was a collection that has the potential to appeal to cashed-up surfers on the hunt for something more expressive than S/Double.

Standouts included poplin-fronted knit polos in navy and olive; fantastic, slightly (too) stacked vulcanized sneakers with a knot detail picked up from the women’s line; and tweaked M-65s in various colors decorated with ribbons of Italian-made, Moroccan-inspired embroidery. Denim jacket shapes were morphed into shirts and decorated with the house star camo. Some of this was too highly strung for the truly blissed-out, and that biker-collar Bermuda onesie worn by Nick Wooster was probably too Lance Mountain-bananas for most of us to jump on. But the embroidered tees represented an interesting way to feel dressed down when dressing up.