A foggy abandoned storefront off Canal Street was the setting for Tim Hamilton's presentation in New York. He was operating well within his comfort zone this season -and that's not a bad thing. The designer has always flirted with the curled-lip sensibility and raw thuggish aesthetics of disaffected youth, and now the world has come to meet him at his sweet spot. There weren't any hoodies, but the attitude felt familiar to anyone who followed the rioting in London last Summer. That might sound trite, but Tim Hamilton was sincere about his goal of addressing the present-day chaos of the outer world by bringing it into the venue, and the engagement was welcome. He was assisted, this time out, by the versatile artist Seth Price. Kismet ? Hamilton has a history of working with artists -last season, for instance, he turned Ross Bleckner paintings into vivid prints- but with Seth Price, he was pushed into more provocative territory. Together, they came up with a range of undyed linen and heavy-duty twill pieces, all of them unisex and most of them visibly lined in Mr Price's prints riffing on corporate logos. The artist also created two videos for the presentation, of the shooting of Ronald Reagan, and created the anarchic sound collage that greeted viewers upon arrival at the gallery. And this chaos provided fitting atmospherics for the clothes Tim Hamilton designed on his own. The result was a series of subversive Alt-Aviation pieces : officially Slick punk kids that either worked for or had broken into the Federal Reserve and were ready to parachute off the roof. The line kept to its everlasting classic quality that makes each piece look like something you want to wear everyday, and -having worked for the Big Basics like Gap and J Crew- he knows that for anything worth wearing the devil is in the details. On the menswear side, the designer hewed close to his signatures, staying within his standard palette of blacks, grays, and royal blue and sending out new iterations of his trademark drop-crotch sweats, collared shirts, and rude boy staples such as long shorts and tanks. A particularly intimidating item was the loose beltless navy trench with its oversize shoulder yoke. A piece you'd dig rigging out with.
