Given fashion’s single-minded, unswerving focus on the new, it’s more than often than not that talented designers who make an imact with their debut, fade into the background in future seasons. It’s good, then, to see NYC-based menswear designer Raun LaRose has gone from strength to strength since his last being mentioned here about two years ago.
Here’s a refresher, or a brief intro for those of you who’ve yet to meet LaRose. A Fashion Institute of Technology grad, LaRose has interned with womenswear evening specialist, Zac Posen, as well at VIBE magazine. His first collection couldn’t be ignored when it landed in my inbox in late 2010, testifying to a new kind of menswear emerging in New York. LaRose understood the importance of wearability, but refused to relinquish a certain extravagance in his search to achieve it. The result was an aesthetic that merged the NYC informal sportiness we’re all so familiar with (Tim Hamilton, Michael Bastian, Patrik Ervell etc.) with a brand of European ostentatiousness usually reserved for the likes of Parisian names like Lucas Ossendrijver at Lanvin.
^ Raun LaRose Spring Summer 2012
This fusion of tastes is still obvious in the SS12 collection, Forever Young, but the slight missteps (student-y flourishes for the sake of being fashun) of the AW10 collection are undoubtedly ironed out. When people say ‘one to watch’, this is what they mean…
Find Raun LaRose on Facebook here.
Images from Not Just a Label
