We’re delighted to welcome fashion critic Nug Judy back for a new round of men’s collection reviews.

Lou Dalton
Influenced by a childhood spent on her grandparents farm, Lou Dalton dropped some farm-to-runway real-real into her collection of the same name. The style turnips she rolled out at her London men’s presentation, the glossiest of farmer’s markets, were definitely of the pre-washed, waxed and buffed variety. No Tough Ducks and sweat-soaked Kirkland tees here, we’re talking quaint English country side shit where your jumper (that’s royal for sweater) was hand-knit by your auntie Chumley after the blitz cancelled her party scene.

Grandad (or Pappy or Gee-Gaw or whatever the goys are calling their daddy’s dad) has up and died and along with the farm, he left you a host of chores and a whole trunk full of mothball-scented classics. Shirts are big and boxy, shorts a little short and wide (having been engineered for the stocky thighs of days gone by) and black socks are as high as the corn. Dalton’s chunky boot collab with Hi-Tec can only meant that before grampy kicked the bucket hey must have stopped into his old-man local snapping up some orthopaedic booties for his tired skankles (that’s like cankles, only skinny and accompanied by a lithe, diminished old calf muscle). What a windfall! Grandpa may be in heaven, but you’ll be the one walking on a cloud.

A-Cold-Wall*
Five minutes into the future and peeping through proverbial beer goggles (the “beer,” foamy with toxic run-off), A-Cold-Wall*’s runway presentation is the hazy object of our boozy affection. Having pissed away our ecosystem, the earth has returned to a state partly primordial, hissing with the vented gases of a heap of K-cups melting into the soup.

Designer Samuel Ross has outfitted us for the our new posting as belle-of-the-blob. For the streets, safety is key and the right place to don a protective cape (that doubles as tarpaulin) and a vegetable-dyed hoodie (oh look, somebody’s family can afford a vegetable!) with bladder-shaped pockets big enough for enough all the IV drip antibios for the journey.

Flanked by grey mud-caked members of the waste-exposed underclass, we’re shielded by the barrier they carry to prevent us being rankled by countless street-beggars and the less cleverly-dressed. When it’s time to party (and post-apocalypse has always promised endless last hurrahs, bubbly and bacchanal), the occasion is right to show some nip. Up top, a transparent former-blue-sky zipped-up crop polo in PVC (moist within minutes for max armpit terrarium growth). Down below, what’s-a-tomato?-red utility pants with mesh patch pockets and drawstrings weighted with metal tubed hardware that swings like fashion dingle-berries announcing your every cute move.

Craig Green
Craig Green has given us the cutest of concepts this season. With the transcendental on his mind, he imagines that angels are already in our midst, a heavenly army stationed here on earth. Thinking of those who “hold our very lives in their hands,” he’s created ascendent looks in tribute to the caretakers, care-workers, cleaners, surgeons, and postal workers of the world (postal workers? really Craig?! If heaven is a place on earth, then the post office is it’s fluoro-lit broom closet).

Green’s workaday spiritual beings are swathed in an ethereal fusion of scrubs and the turtleneck of the bikini world, the tank-ini. These angels may have wings of a sort but they’ve got their feet firmly planted earthward in sensible black rubber and canvas Mary-Janes. If Green’s runway were outfitted with a P.A. system we’d be hearing “Nurse Halter will see you now, and she’s got pharmaceuticals!” Whatever she’s got, it’s inspired a whole other set of lewks that can only be described as Jesus Christ Avatar.

Compete with portable crucifix (never a need to get down off that cross when you can take it with you) these comfy separates are abuzz with a swarm of pixelated rainbow pattern. In the fabric of our lives, Green’s prophet-wear is high function for a martyr: from a rewarding day of community service straight out to the after-life.

And when you’re gone (flutter of angel’s wings), why leave a bag for the Sally-Ann when you can leave a colorful shroud instead? Sold!

Martine Rose
Britain’s been in a bit of a weird state lately. Having consumed a clashing cocktail of anti-immigrant-spiked-Brexit-brew and a frothy royal wedding champagne swizzled with inclusion, she’s suffering from a hangover in the form of an identity crisis. Fear not, Martine Rose has the antidote and it’s in the form of the “love letter to London” she just sent down the runway and popped in the post. Not content to sit idly by while her country obfuscated, Rose gathered her wits and put on show! On a little dead-end street in the London neighbourhood of Chalk Farm, her invited crowd was comprised of the usual suspects: buyers, editors and fashion cognoscenti trash like Virgil-give-the-Nike-CEO-Abloh and Luka-too-cute-for-this-earth-Sabbat plunked right next to the local rabble.

Rose sent a subcultural, era-jumping, happy melding of boys (and a few girls) marching down her runway melting away the sang-froid of the fashoiners and whipping up some unbridled enthusiasm from the hood’s residents. The designer let the ’80s version of the Wide Boy (a look that took root on London’s meaner streets in the 1930s and was almost exclusively based on delinquency and expressive pants) live in the same body with the sensitive chav of shoe-gaze and the psychedelic-foppery of acid house. Racing stripes lay next to leopard, wild print tucking neatly into a high-waist while hardware dangled from the neck, circled the middle and rattled in chains on viciously squared-off patent loafers.

Less Gigolo-Horse in approach, Rose sent out an evocation of lil ragamuffin Marcus Brewer (now hottie-with-a-body Nicholas Hoult’s character from About a Boy) in a knit hoodie that resembled a craft-sale tea-cozy paired with paneled pedal-pushers and a sweet blue fringed-suede change purse. Like wee Markus Brewer singing Mystikal’s “Shake Ya Ass” in the classic film, Rose offers us up a stylistic-doughnut, both sugar and salt, as panacea for the DT’s resulting from Britain’s most recent ragers.