Swaim Huston is bringing his preppy bona fides to Rag & Bone, the brand that Brits Marcus Wainwright and David Neville built from a single pair of jeans into an American standard. A tennis ace who could be Wes Anderson’s cousin, with a taste for subversively conservative tailoring, Hutson is the same generation as the Rag & Bone founders, a couple of years behind them in the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund. Like Wainwright and Neville, he’s seen American fashion through boom times and bust. If his own previous brands Obedient Sons & Daughters and The Academy New York never reached lift off the way R&B did, now that he’s installed here, he’s steering the creative side with unassuming confidence.
“I wanted to make sure that I’m working with the DNA of the brand: work wear, obviously denim, and then injecting some tailoring into the mix,” he said at a showroom appointment before taking the collection to Pitti Uomo this week. On his mood board for fall: a vintage pic of Basquiat and a Mercedes sedan from the artist’s own ’80s boom days shot on the street in Brooklyn Heights, bright swatches of cherry red and Carolina blue, and sturdy denim with the perfect fade, references whose familiarity only somehow reinforce their appeal. The same goes for the clothes on the racks, which span oil wash canvas work pants and a matching zip-front jacket at one end of the spectrum and navy chalk stripe tailoring separates at the other, with lots of preppy staples—striped rugbies, fair isle sweaters, a black watch plaid flannel—in between. “I’m energized,” he said. “It’s something I believe in and can wear.” It seems likely the Rag & Bone shopper will feel similarly.
