Punchy, emerging London label JordanLuca makes Paris debut

By

Dominique Muret

Translated by
Nicola Mira

Published
Jun 21, 2018

JordanLuca, an emerging label first discovered at the London Fashion Week Men, is well worth a peek. This small street couture brand is less than a year old, but has genuine menswear expertise. Its contemporary looks overflow with tricky details (reflective strips, micro buttons, zips, drawstrings and unexpected volumes) and use superb fabrics, enabling JordanLuca to strike the right balance between top-notch quality and captivating design.
 

The label was spawned last season by the shared aspirations of Italian designer Luca Marchetto and British milliner/designer Jordan Bowen. Both aged 34, they wanted to set up their own project after parallel careers at two benchmark fashion names like Vivienne Westwood and Stephen Jones.
 
Marchetto is a graduate of Milan’s Naba design school, and cut his fashion teeth with Italian designer Lucio Costa before realising his lifetime dream of working for Vivienne Westwood. He landed in London eleven years ago and managed to become the personal assistant of the iconic British designer, a role he held for seven years. Jordan Bowen was trained as a milliner and has chiefly worked for renowned London hat-maker Stephen Jones.

“Our brand is the fruit of our joint experience, a fusion between London’ street subculture and Italian tailoring and finishing. All the clothes are made in Italy, using mostly Italian materials,” Luca Marchetto told FashionNetwork.com.
 

JordanLuca’s sand-coloured hooded parkas, with a long black zip and Velcro bands on the front, are fitted with multiple pockets, some of them transparent and decorated with a patch resembling the NASA crest. In a similar mood, survival suits/sleeping bags morph into raincoats, and you can stash a trench coat, unsuspected and undetected, into a multi-functional gilet’s pocket.
 
The clothes are decorated with strange, Mexican-inspired embroidered motifs like small craters. Worth a mention are also the amusing worker overalls in black cotton, dotted with fine fluorescent yellow embroidery made by Vatican nuns.
 

With its first collection, Autumn/Winter 2018-19, JordanLuca won over 14 multibrand retailers, among them Harvey Nichols, H Lorenzo in Los Angeles and L’Eclaireur in Paris. In addition, the label caught the eye of the British Fashion Council, which included it in the BFC Designers Showrooms, a showcase for emerging design talent at the last London Fashion Week Men.
 
JordanLuca was then picked with another fifteen labels to present its collection in Paris, on June 21-26, at the London Show Rooms section of the Tranoï Week event. Among other brands making their debut there, Léon Bara, a label launched three years ago by Omar Afridi and Hugo Edwards, now styled by talented Japanese designers Hayate Ichimori and Kazuya Kojima, whose sophisticated men’s wardrobe is infused with a sportswear mood.