Puffa jackets are to fashion as the Brussel sprout is to a Christmas dinner: not to everyone's taste, perhaps, but they appeal to a discerning palette, they're good for you and they're sensible. And winter wouldn't be the same without them.
Yet the puffa jacket has until recently been treated with the same disdain, loathing and bemusement as the Cat Bin Lady was. They're the stuff of hill-walking or worse. The high-glam contingent cannot fathom a garment that obscures the body or keeps it warm, while more rarefied tastes cannot abide a style that may once have clad, variously, a Spice Girl, a posho and that guy on The Fast Show who thinks everything's "brilliaaaant!".
We complain that catwalk fashion doesn't work for the quotidian, that we can't walk to work in 10in heels or buy milk in a pair of three-leg trousers, but here's high-fashion for the lowest common denominator – and still we wrinkle our noses at it. Some of the industry's most visionary names have experimented with the humble puffa; it's the most versatile means of combining fabric, volume and silhouette-play with practicality and modern ease. So where's the catch?
Rei Kawakubo of Comme des Garçons (now there's a name to drop if you wish to convince someone of a piece's fashionability) is known for her lumps and bumps – the ones on her clothes, that is. Scattered across dress and jackets and, yes, nylon coats, she uses padding to redefine, reimagine and newly analyse the shape of the body in ways that are far from conventionally flattering. So, although you may feel like the Michelin man in yours, remember: this is not a skin-tight trend, nor was meant to be. It's okay if the man in the street can't distinguish your arse from your elbow when you've got your coat on.
But if clean lines are the order of the day, then look no further than fellow Japanese designer Junya Watanabe, who has promoted the puffa for quite a few years now. His autumn/winter 2009 collection featured dresses, stoles, A-line skirts and princess coats made from "puffa", and nipped, tucked and belted into place to give a form-defining take. Suddenly the duvet coats of the mid-Nineties didn't seem so terrible after all. This season, master of uptown chic Michael Kors garbed his models in cosy tinfoil numbers that resembled nothing if not exposure blankets – and that's perhaps the most appropriate sartorial analogy to hand.
Gothic fantasist Gareth Pugh, meanwhile, has always added puffed, distended nodules to clothes; but if you'd rather not wear a dress with globes instead of sleeves, his billowing puffa coats resuscitated the form in the late Noughties. And another of London's directional designers Marios Schwab showed severe duvet coats, cut like Edwardian riding habits with undulating puffa hems for autumn 2007. Puffas have now taken on an air of urban cool, quite apart from the outdoorsy sort of can-do that they once emitted in the traditional Moncler and quilted jacket sense.
Melding practicality and warmth with a hyperbolic, man-made aesthetic (they're no Harris tweed, for instance, or natural shearling) it's futuristic outerwear for the fearless. No wonder Uniqlo sells so many. Puffas have become gimpy in all the right ways – playing on plasticky themes of bondage and fetishism, rather than simply what the nerds used to wear.
And then there's the Royal wedding this year – how better to celebrate so horsey a union than with the traditional garb of a puffa gilet: perfect for huntin', shootin', sailin' or shoppin'. There's a puffa for every occasion and demographic, you see. Aren't puffa jackets brilliaaaant?!
No comments:
Post a Comment