Y/Project’s lopsided fashion

This season, many designers have pushed the latest boundaries of menswear and, beyond it, of clothing tout court. The question is how to be innovative, when it has all been done before. Among the experimentalists, Glenn Martens appears to be the most audacious, daring to tread new ground each time, at the risk of not being understood and, besides, of not conforming to the contemporary canon of fashion aesthetics.

For the Spring/Summer 2020, Y/Project has gone off on a tangent with silhouettes that seem lopsided, as Martens amused himself with asymmetries in garment construction and proportions. It only takes a few details, the way a garment is buttoned or where the end of a lapel points, to give clothes a blurry allure.

One shoulder seems higher than the other, which seems to be slipping off. The model's body is nearly swallowed by a sport jacket whose right sleeve bubbles up and swells beneath waves of pleats, while the left sleeve falls forward. A design trick that creates an odd sort of movement, as though the garment was stuck with a distorted shape after a spin-dry cycle on steroids. The same kind of spiral flow found on a windbreaker that corkscrews on itself, its zipped pockets at a diagonal angle.

Elsewhere, a polo’s buttoned collar stretches unexpectedly to one side, stirring up confusion between buttons and buttonholes. A shirt sports an irregular row of buttons which shoot off to the side in an unexpected dogleg, as though making themselves scarce, while on another shirt, one side of the collar balloons as if it was ready to fly.

The left lapel of an overcoat’s collar drops down nearly to the hem, accenting the garment's length, in the same way that the bottom end of a pair of jeans sticks exactly at the top of the shoes. A bomber jacket can be slipped on from the bottom up and also vice versa.

The whole show plays out to a wacky soundtrack, in which the passionate notes of Georges Bizet's Carmen veer unexpectedly off course, suddenly morphing into a droll parody by the Muppet Show.

Y/Project’s lopsided fashion

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