It is only appropriate that as the world of work is changing so fundamentally, Boss is too. Following last season’s fine beyond-office outing, Ingo Wilts and his team leaned further into the zeitgeist through the unveiling of fresh brand codes, and continued their development of clothing for which there is as yet no specified category: “Everywear” maybe?
Brand-codes-wise there was a near-exclusive adherence to a tricolor black/white/camel palette. These colors were also the ingredients of the new stripe and B monogram that are the main utterances in Wilts’s fresh articulation of the Boss brand language. “I have been working and waiting for this for maybe two years,” he said of the overhaul. “I think it looks much more sophisticated and modern.” Certainly the subconscious emphasis on the beta-ness of B rather than the alpha-ness of Boss is in tune with the times and, as the multitude of them in the market right now attests, so are monograms.
Both for women and men, the clothes were the blended family offspring of a three-parent arrangement between tailoring, sportswear, and eveningwear. The most tailored pieces were often cut in technical fabrics, and the sportiest in “noble” materials (leather, wools, and silk). The evening-y pieces, especially women’s, were shaped with a deftly minimalist-almost severity that echoed the sartorial. It was notable that the most constructed sartorial jacket was, in Look 2, a piece of “womenswear,” and that men (at least as could be seen in the glitchy file share through which I scoped these images) were denied a role in the animalia pattern story. Happily a handsome, informal shorts-and-shirt combo for men was included among a standout saffron section of womenswear.
Boss is to fashion manufacture what Bosch is to engineering manufacture: indisputably alpha (and what a collaboration that would be). Here, the label’s root-and-branch rethink of a contemporary uniform was both precisely and functionally advanced.
