Hourglass Tailoring Eclipses Menswear

The likes of Dior Men, Vetements, GmBH, Dunhill, and Kaushik Velendra put the spotlight on gender fluid, body contouring shapes in their Autumn/Winter '22 outings. We explore hourglass tailoring and its place in menswear

- Manish Mishra

Hourglass tailoring can be easily traced to 14th century Europe. From the Renaissance to the turn of the 18th century, corsets continued their reign becoming more conical and accentuating the waist. However, the watershed moment was during the 1947 post World War II in Paris, when Christian Dior reignited this shape with his New Look silhouette - the bar jacket cinching the waist paired with a billowing full-skirtdrawing from the Belle Époque era and referencing his own mother. Dior's New Look remains one of the most seminal moments in haute couture history. Cut to the present, designer Kim Jones at Dior Men resurrects the bar jacket recontextualising it, tweaking its proportions, making it lighter, supple, and impossibly contemporary for men season after season. For Autumn/Winter 22, he initiated a conversation with Monsieur Dior proposing a masculine reinterpretation of the bar jacket in subtly varying nuances of grey and pastels, expressing the shades of the Parisian sky.

Also, worth mentioning is Louis Vuitton's AW 22, which saw an array of bar shaped suits, top coats, and parkas, all showcased in the late Virgil Abloh's streetwear tradition.