Lee Roach Spring/Summer 2016 Menswear

Lee Roach is happily engaged in a process that is as much about the dissection and anatomy of clothing as it is about design. He gets a kick from slitting away the skin of his specimens to show the muscles beneath. Today Roach showed denim that had been painstakingly sanded to reveal a distressed stencil of the seams beneath. All that nylon strapping operates as an exterior network of rib and tendon. The olive pants, Austrian army issue, were pulled apart and then rebuilt, each pair differently, as an exercise in de-standardization and creative reconstruction. A white Alcantara vest was crafted by one person from one piece of fabric—and the punching tool used to fashion the holes that perforated its edges then hung from the mannequin wearing it. The black jacket and pants with exterior pockets were made from cupro, a fabric often used for suit linings, which Roach washed to add enough robustness to sit against the world outside, as well as against the skin within. Roach’s project can appear obtuse at first. But the more you look, the more you see.