Heron Preston Fall 2022 Menswear Collection

Found objects, archetypes, and uniforms are the three bedrocks of Heron Preston’s “instant language.” By incorporating these elements into his design work he aims to fire our synapses with the endorphins of recognition the moment they hit the eye, while simultaneously designing them to be unorthodox enough to trigger the acquisitional adrenaline of intrigue.

Either one or the other of those criteria were not satisfyingly enough fulfilled in his spring 2022 season, so Preston elected to jump one step forward for this meet-up and dig into fall 2022 instead. After comparing notes on the “difficult but happy” Louis Vuitton menswear show we just saw in Paris—Preston flew in for his close confrere’s posthumously-presented collection from the New Guards studio in Milan adjacent to Virgil’s Off-White team—we got to it.

There were several key phrases in this collection’s latest-phase deployment of Preston’s brand langage. One was the black fashion fabrications of the fireman’s jacket and the application of that workwear staple’s key oversized clasps—designed to be easy for gloved hands to clip together or apart—to act as closures for the DSNY bags he has been exploring since 2016.

That collaboration, way back when, was catalyzed by Preston’s Saul-like conversion to environmentalism; this season he rolled out a new in-house system for classifying the materials used in his work according to their impact upon our ecosystems. This, he explained, has three tiers that run from “Standard” (less than 50% sustainable and due to be phased out of use altogether by the designer) “Preferred” (50% or more by weight certified sustainable) and finally “eX-Ray”—garments and objects whose materials are “nearly” 100% sustainable, “with everything tracked across the supply chain from raw material provenance to shipping and manufacturing to social and environmental conditions.” Preston said of his new “eX-Ray” classification: “hopefully one day, you know, other designers can adopt eX-Ray materials into their collections too. The vision is like it becomes a b2b business where there is the possibility of adopting eX-Ray materials—eX-Ray nylon, eX-Ray cotton, eX-Ray jersey—into other collections.”

More above-the-bonnet utterances here included denim patched with industrial diamond plate finishing, razor blade and industrial tape finishings and labels, and some cool, long liner coats inspired by moving blankets. Overdyed denim in emergency orange over black had the intended effect “of looking like it has been run over by a steamroller.” Preston said he’d tried to work against the current popularity of letterman jackets by abstracting the characters on his, and rejected the thought of a rubber rain boot—too fashion-ubiquitous to be cool—in order to develop a new combat boot. His Heron photo-signifier was delivered on a cropped t-shirt wadded internally to give it a look-twice appearance of floating off the body below.

Also cropped were the high-waisted workwear jackets worn against baselayer and high boots in his womenswear. Preston said he develops his “HP woman” silhouette by anthropologizing New York cool girls. He said of his findings: “It literally looks like they took their boyfriend’s or their dad’s jacket out of the closet and threw it on and and found a way for it to become theirs and to make it sexy, a pair of high boots or some heels or something form fitting.” Preston has also for the first time this season expanded his label’s output into underwear.