While the recent round of men’s shows has been by and large free from any literal references to the current, absurdist hellscape of an election cycle, the campaigns made for a bit of compelling fodder at Assembly, as deftly handled by founder Greg Armas. After all, it was friends’ Bernie Sanders flair that helped in small part to set Armas’s mind alight this season (buttons bearing not the face of the senator from Vermont, but of Haile Selassie turned up on his looks).
Still, that idea was secondary to larger themes that coursed through these clothes and piqued Armas’s perennially curious psyche, like time and authenticity. Eight of the 10 models who appeared in the label’s presentation were street-cast and ranged from reggae producers to Home Depot staffers and beyond. In many cases they sported their own necklaces and bracelets, underscoring both that notion of authenticity and the fluid, easily adaptable qualities that have typified the Assembly brand from the word go; not a look in the bunch seemed as though it had been the subject of overzealous styling. A glance at shirting in a gorgeous delicate Japanese woodblock print, or the jackets Armas whipped up from patchworked, overdyed vintage garments, and you’d be hard-pressed to deny the certain sense of harmony—and yes, even a bit of the idealism—they seemed to emanate.
Time, that most weighty of ideas, the designer nodded to with a handful of graphic tees unearthed from the Assembly archives (chief among them were a revisionist, Hebrew-lettered take on a Grateful Dead print and a haunting Sinéad O’Connor image—both musical forces who served as figureheads of awareness of one stripe or another), but also the quietly luxe, enduring appeal of pieces like raw-edged seersucker tux pants. The yin and yang stood among Armas’s chosen icons for Spring, and it served him well. There was a beautiful balance here.
