The fall / winter season was a strange one. The looks were bewildering. Shaggy floor-length fur coats, maintenance-type boiler suits and jumpsuits, and a collection by an iconic Italian label seemingly inspired by a mountain-dwelling Mongolian tribe - you'd have been hard pressed to find them being worn even by the men of fashion-conscious Milan or Paris. Still, fashion's outlandish ways have always been easily explained by the sentiment that fashion is never meant to be rational, but rather, inspirational and with winter generally having a dark, mysterious air about it, there was always room to go over the top.
Summer on the other hand has always been more practical. And, with global markets in the midst of a credit crunch, scaled-back, safe and saleable were words floating about among fashion insiders where they considered what the coming spring / summer wardrobe might hold. When it came to menswear, they could not have been more wrong.
Of course, the usual suspects such as Thom Browne, Comme des Garcon's Rei Kawakubo and John Galliano presented unusual garb: a variety of skirts from the first two maestros, and what looked like a collage of colourful fabric scraps sewn together by the latter to make his collection. Even Kawakubo's husband, Adrian Joffe was lost for words, simply saying: 'She's always loved men in skirts', and 'in the end, black is best' when forced to rationalise his wife's designs to fashion website men.style.com. But it's what we've come to expect from them, recession or not.
The real surprise came from fashion houses where we expected more commercial value - such as Fendi, where the shoe for the summer is a classic leather lace-up ... with a wedged heel. Unless men have suddenly developed a Tom Cruise height complex, we don't see this being a big hit. That's not forgetting the shoulder purse, much like the purses your granny carried her change in when she went to the market.
Why Lanvin decorated floppy straw hats with flowers and fashioned them into brooches also had us stumped. Even at the usually conservative Calvin Klein, it was baffling to understand what kind of man Italo Zucchelli had in mind when he designed his full fluorescent red and yellow suits with matching ties and shoes, and the three-quarter-length shorts that look like part of the American Football League's uniform. It's a lot to ask of a gender that still struggles to embrace the colour pink as part of its wardrobe.
Drop-crotch shorts were also a strangely popular phenomenon with Versace, Yves Saint Laurent and Armani onboard this droopy bandwagon. Genie pants, harem pants, MC Hammer pants - they go by many names and these silhouettes were first introduced for women. They never quite gained popularity in the mainstream market among the ladies who are arguably allowed to be more adventurous, so what possible explanation could there be for introducing them to men as high fashion?