BY Nkosazana Ngwadla
Sometime in Mid-May, Bianca Saunders took to Instagram to offer her audience an exclusive detailed look at her SS23 “Reverse 23 Jeans”. Pulled back by an attached belt and buckle feature, this pair of high-waisted denim jeans features a white-stitched seam reaching around the trouser leg, ending in precise triangular cuts at the cuffs.
“Deceptively detailed” isn’t quite sufficient to describe the oeuvre that Saunders has built in her relatively young career, playing with menswear tradition to produce garments that are contemporary and innovative. The signature of Saunders’s eponymous label is subversive tailoring that eloquently twists the traditional anatomy of menswear pieces. There is always much more than meets the eye.
Saunders is proficient in using draping to play with the seemingly minor details in garments’ wearability, fundamentally re-orienting traditional bodily relationships between person and piece. This experimental approach was front and centre at the Met Gala, where the label’s current muse, Usher, wore a broad-shouldered gabardine suit with detachable sleeves. With its shoulders detached slightly slouched, the suit had a slightly slouched, boxy appearance.
Appearing alongside the R&B icon, Saunders herself wore a corseted black reverse-blazer dress with its own white detached sleeves. Saunders’s stunning tribute to Karl Lagerfeld balanced traditions produced by Lagerfeld himself, against Saunders’s own mark – exaggerated features and subtle twists in the fabric. Her experimental approach towards the traditional tailoring and forms of menswear disrupts the stiffness and rules built around its utility and wearability.
Saunders most recently showed at Paris Menswear Fashion Week, where her Spring 2024 collection was a collaboration with Farah and At. Kollective, and incorporated the visual language of musical and visual artist Lee “Scratch” Perry.
The same anatomical play that is key in Saunders’s own visual language is present in the collection’s shirts, lightly ruched and folded at the waist to accentuate the male models’ waists and emphasize their shoulders. Relaxed trouser-legs were embellished with pleats, while the wrap-around seam made its return in another pair of denim jeans.
Image: Bianca Saunders
