At the age of 27, Reese Cooper officially went into that phase of life where he must be ready for the wedding circuit. But when his cousin recently made the knot in South Carolina, he was in the ironic position, after almost a decade of designing, of a ‘mass pirational’ retailer for a last-minute suit on the way to the airport. “I had something like that:” This is ridiculous, I have to solve that, “the designer remembered in a showroom in the Upper Marais, where both his collection for the men of the namesake and his lighter RCOS line were shown.
Before spring, Cooper dealt with again calibrating California Casual with a more mature, tailor -made and usually unisex offer that easily pierces in more raised environments, while still retaining sporting details. Ripstop cords covered the waist on blazers, a trench and a Harrington jacket in Nylon; Oversized freight bags gave button downs or a printed poncho a new functionality, but also looked fresh and refined on a black, white and red Houndstooth. As always, his characteristic Carabiner, a piece was designed by a former spacecraft engineer friends over Instagram, a passage.
From his process, the designer explained: “My favorite thing is personal to take something that you would find traditionally, then take the right one and place it in the wrong place or vice versa.” Not that something did not seem like it here. Last Tuesday, Cooper’s Posse of Chosen Family, including the stylist Savannah White, traveled with him an hour north of LA to the Angeles National Forest. There his models posed on a rock in the San Gabriel -River, at a location that the designer had discovered during a walk. In a meaningful detail, he shot this lookbook with a thumb from his friends at the local forest service (search for new developments in that budding relationship next season). It speaks volumes about Cooper’s interest in construction on community, a philosophy that he has absorbed from Virgil Abloh. “If you do something nice that people want to be in the neighborhood, that should be the focus,” he said. They don’t often hear that during the fashion week Swirl. Let’s see where that brings him afterwards.