Christopher Raeburn Spring 2018 Menswear....Fashionweekly...On Fow24news.com

Just like its inspiration—Slawomir Rawicz’s The Long Walk, a disputed account of his 1941 escape from a Siberian gulag and subsequent 6,500-kilometer traverse to British-held India—a lot happened in this Christopher Raeburn collection.....

The opening section featured capes, sweats, jackets, totes, macs, parkas, and shorts made of spliced angular sections of mesh, jersey, and what looked like some kind of violently off-red orange synthetic. This was taken from “pre-flown” kites and was just one of this collection’s portfolio of Raeburn-signature reconstructions.

Others included desert camo pieces reworked into pimped-up shorts, bombers, and shirts, and 1940s vintage army surplus transformed into 21st-century standard anorak and mac. There was also a tote with a back pocket that looked to have been made from the same heavy fabric. Most of these pieces featured black webbing trims on which Raeburn’s laudably ethical three Rs—Remade, Reduced, Recycled—were etched. Within this section of nicely sliced and diced technical-meets-streetwear were shift dresses for women and an orange-branded gray jersey jacket with lapels and everything for men: signals that Raeburn was testing the boundaries of his utility-formed practice.

Then he gave it a proper shove with a long section of tulle made technical. This techni-tulle, either in black or that distress signal orange/red, was used at first as shells around shorts and sweats featuring his animal of the season, a desert rodent called a jerboa, and then in total looks for both men and women, still framed by that webbing. As with Rawicz’s epic saga, not everything on this journey was totally believable, especially that closing section, but it was still a trip worth taking.