During last September’s iteration of New York Men’s Day, Aaron Potts was looking to expand his genderless assortment with womenswear-friendly pieces at the behest of some of his retail partners. It was a challenging task for a designer whose ethos is to create clothes for everyone without the anachronism that is a binary gendered label, but he undertook it nonetheless for the sake of his business. “It worked!” Potts exclaimed this morning, once again at the Men’s Day showcase in Hudson Yards. “We were able to get some women’s accounts, so we leaned into it a bit more.”
Potts’s fall lineup did indeed include a variety of women’s dresses, most of which he cut in his signature hulking, oversized silhouettes, with the exception of a couple of styles that hewed closer to the body. The most compelling was look thirty-two in this lookbook: A handkerchief-hemmed, long-sleeved dress in striped jersey with interlacing criss-crossed knots across the bodice. The addition of these bodycon styles may very well please Potts’s buyers, but it also introduces a healthy range of shapes into his otherwise mostly billowing assortment.
With the exception of some scarlet red pops spread throughout, the fall lineup was almost entirely black-based. “I wanted to capture this feeling of when I first moved to New York to go to Parsons in the ’90s,” said Potts, who is originally from the Midwest. “That moment in New York was the sickest, and I remember all these herds of people moving in the streets in all black. Plus I wear it all the time and so do all of my friends.”
It’s true that New Yorkers often lean for head-to-toe black—it’s slimming, easy, chic, and requires the least amount of upkeep (washer-dryers in-unit are a sort of unicorn in the city’s apartments)—but Potts’s proposal was far off from the minimal chic standard. Oversized boiler suits, wide trousers, skirts and tops cut in jerseys, wools, and leather textures, all layered together, offered a mishmash of proportions and textures that felt as authentic to the New York spirit Potts looked to capture as they did to his keenness for combining a variety of sartorial languages. That said, the concept worked best where Potts let his cut and proportions speak for themselves rather than through the utility details and pockets he added to some shapes. (Look two was a particular highlight—more of this, please.)
In addition to the core black assortment, Potts worked in texture by way of beige and off-white shaggy floccose knits, and explored print this season with reimagined menswear patterns all in black, white, and gray. The most successful iteration of this idea was a blown up houndstooth-like graphic in wool bonded with neoprene. The pattern provided just enough visual interest to the lineup without distracting from the proportion work that makes Potts a worthwhile designer to look out for each season.
