JORDANLUCA: Seeing Red

Near the end of JORDANLUCA’s S/S 22 film, a model walks around an abandoned car park in a white rosette tank top stained from a diagonal red scar atop their left pectoral. This began Jordan Bowen and Luca Marchetto’s dances with blood and roses for a few seasons now. For their latest S/S 24 show, catwalk effects indulged a fantastical feeling — an eternal red sunlight. Possibly that 2022 model reopened the wound from season’s past for a magic bloodletting, releasing old wounds (or inspirations) to redefine their world bathed in the residue of red.

SHOWstudio's M-C Hill sat down with Jordan and Luca immediately after their show. And then we spoke to them again.

JORDANLUCA prove that a slanted laceration above the pectoral signifies more than ‘ouch!’ sometimes. Slang for laceration is 'slash,' immortalised in bloody, drippy typeface by its namesake punk zine from 1970s Los Angeles. The passage of time has observed Slash mag’s iconic logo coolly celebrated in Jun Takahashi’s Undercover A/W 15 tribute. Before Jonio, the slash was a trademark in Vivienne Westwood’s A/W 96 catwalk closing opulent, bejeweled officer’s ‘muscle’ jackets — one featuring beaded, bloody scars striated across biceps, backs and yes, the pectoral again. It’s the ‘Martyr to Love’ MAN show with Cameron Alborzian (yes that Cameron from Madonna’s ‘Express Yourself’) and Marcus Schenkenberg. These examples contextualise the slash as sensual, guttural instincts. The slash in historic styles therefore, remains in style. Perhaps that slash within historic menswear DNA, was what JORDANLUCA were channeling in their S/S 24 show?

No. JORDANLUCA were thinking about red lipstick. They considered stark comparisons to use their menswear to reset their womenswear. They were looking for something visceral contained in red lipstick that connotes power or sex. The S/S 24 collection is as normal as a girl preparing for work, dressing for the job, but also (abnormally) for her primal codes.

As this new collection expresses the importance of connections, you can trace that bloody slash to communicate Jordanluca’s sharp knowledge of menswear lore. Or, you can observe the alchemical power of blood and rose to birth pvc lipstick traces across their runway.

Jordan Bowen: I am serving as a conduit for Luca.

M-C Hill: [Laughs] When we conversed after the show, you were both kind of surprised that it turned out that well. There was something happening during the fittings backstage that you and Luca were arriving at.

JB: We had no precedent for what womenswear meant and how it would feel. You go into it confidently blind. You drag the collection forward. You arrive in Milan. You haven't really seen the casting with the styling. It sounds naive to say it, but actually, I think we kind of went there not planning anything. And then, obviously everything starts to come to life and starts to have context. I think it was important to bounce different girls with different looks, different vibes, to give it character. I don't want to homogenise the look of the girl.

M-C Hill: You both wanted that red lighting right?

JB: We started from the outset of planning to have the red. Everything started with lipstick. It’s both literal and subjective. Looking at what it means, how it feels and what it says, you kind of think in a slight sex club direction, which is always important for us. It was important this time that it felt a bit illicit and gauche and naughty and, I think especially introducing womenswear, that it didn't feel too chic. If it comes across as too perfumed and too overworked, it wouldn't have worked. I was conscious of bringing the woman down a little bit, in terms of a kind of chicness, making her a bit raw. And the music that was jarring, the music at the end with Lana [Del Rey], we stripped it back using AI. It's Hope Is a Dangerous Thing for a Woman Like Me to Have but, 'I Have It.’ I think it says a lot about what an expectation is on a woman, what we expect of women and what power a woman is or isn't allowed.

M-C Hill: The car park show was your big reset, then A/W 22 felt like pure divinity. The greatest show in Milan featuring heightened divinity of angelic darkness. And then you held the electrifying Lonsdale show where rave and sex came together in a natural, obvious way. This one is all of those things. There's a visual language that is more expansive. There's a distinction between the men's and women's worlds you were looking at. After this show I immediately watched the car park film stream again, because there were connections.

JB: And Luca’s eyes lit up because, as he was saying, ‘Well, that's where we went.’ That's what we revisited, that show. We did. I know that Luca was talking about the fabric that we use. We went back to the same supplier. We reworked a lot of those pieces. Even the peekaboo delicacy of the lace kilt. I loved the way that S/S 22 flowed. The way that it starts white and pale, mismatched whites, beiges, ivories and then just kind of goes into colour. I think that's what we wanted, to style it in that way. To evolve it, start from zero, work and build into something that's much more intense in terms of colour palette.

M-C Hill: What you said, how you both leapfrog from one thing to another. I think about the A/W 21 show, where you designed a languid silhouette that predated the raven silhouette from A/W 22. You bring something from over here and then pollinate it over there. There's a lot of bouncing back and forth, which is entertaining.

JB: Like Luca spoke about, we self-referenced. We were looking back, we did codes in 2022, we were thinking, should we? And I think we had to.

M-C Hill: That's when you know you're on something. Mrs. Prada always does this, right? She self-references because she's got that confidence of her history to do it, because there's a meaning in honesty.

JB: And also, you have to consider what's selling, what's working. But I think it was about being sensible and not going too far, not taking the men's too far away, because the womenswear is already far away. It was about staying close to what we know, where we felt was ground zero, of JORDANLUCA. Going back to that point and building off, rather than trying to jump and make the menswear the same as women's.

M-C Hill: There's something that Martine Rose does; being decidedly cisgendered. And she never catches flack for it. What you and Luca do is also kind of cisgendered. You made an active decision to separate the man from the woman, but you put them in the same universe.

JB: We talked about this. I talked about the Eve coming from Adam's rib, but it's not completely different. What happened before was an extension of menswear. You got one type of girl, and I think it's hard to explore a woman's body, rather the atypical woman's body. And I was struggling a little bit with it. What I realised is that the menswear and the womenswear is so broad that there's a massive chasm between. You know us by now, we're extremists in how we think. We're quite polarized in how we think. And I think we rely very much on pushing those two things together. So the more extreme, the better.

M-C Hill: The extremes of what you and Luca do is so important to understand what you represent. The first time we met, we talked about printing those queen's jewels directly onto the clothes. Then you have that tough lady notion with the handbag. The polar opposite of that royal class system is the working class. There was dissidence, you found the middle ground between the dissident and the grand. Within those polar extremes, there's an odd connectivity happening, right? The power of connecting. Some people will relate that indomitable lady to Thatcher, but other people will associate it with working class frustrations from Thatcherism’s inequalities.

JB: I think power comes into it a lot because of playing with the inequality of power, reclaiming of power a little bit. For example, looking at commerce this season — Wall Street, what it means for power dressing, the significance of that power. What does it mean to wear a double breasted suit against something that's maybe a bit more casual?

M-C Hill: Another thing we discussed is the British/Milanese collision. Maybe this season was decidedly more British, whereas before, you're kind of sorting through the Milan system.

JB: Up to this season, it's been very much a byproduct of living in London. Luca will give it a bit more of an elevated Italian spin.

M-C Hill: It feels a little more tailored too.

JB: You make it irreverent by elevating subversions. The subversion is to elevate using London. But in a way, I think somehow the silhouette, the vibe felt decidedly more Italian. It felt more like a London version of what Italy is rather than an Italian version of what London is. Again, we're playing on the cornerstones, using one to play the other.

M-C Hill: Well there's a natural subversion in JORDANLUCA, right? You have this punk Italian boy designing Scottish kilts, finding perfection in the Scottish kilt. And he's not from Scotland, he's Italian! So the subversion is inherent. And then your rose accessories, the silken rose, given those supersized, steel thorns. Then this stigmata shoe from S/S 24.

JB: [Laughs] The stigmata shoe…

M-C Hill: Going back to the eyelet bits from the S/S 22 show that carry over to the womenswear. The kilts this time were a little higher. What was fashion communication behind doing that this season?

JB: I think Luca would testify for this. One of Luca’s things is that little peep. A little peep of the kilt. It feels sexy. It implies the naked, but the reality is that they're not. Like, a certain like, shock and awe, then it's like, what? As a silhouette, that was a decision to revisit as a Jordanluca silhouette, if there is one.

M-C Hill: We’re talking a lot about the menswear revealing the womenswear, predicting where to go in terms of the ideas, right? Three images from the car park show were apparent in the womenswear. First, take Look 29, S/S 22. You have a line to separate the ‘breastedness’ of the suit. This line, also inLook 30 is raised to where it sat in the womenswear. So you have the hard definition of the line in the first image, raised on the clavicle in the second image. That was a big takeaway from the show, it screamed ‘Spring 22! Spring 22!’ Seeing the women with steel scaffolding along their clavicle. That was one of the mystic principles behind your womenswear.

JB: There is an indirect and direct link back to this. This idea of full circle. And it's good that you're picking up on that. We work quite holistically, we think quite holistically and the way that we think and feel is the way we design, what we respond to. It's nice that you said that, because that is kind of how we work.

M-C Hill: Then bringing the perfecto back, thatwhite perfecto, in red. You changed it, which was maybe cut in a menswear way. It's got those codes, but now it's corseted. It protrudes for a little sweetheart cleavage.

JB: Yes.

M-C Hill: S/S 24 adopts a new language, but has the spirit of its forebears. You both tend to surprise people. I was speaking to a stylist about what you do, and they said ‘I kind of don't believe that it's its own thing now, but it is great.’ I also remember us speaking the first day we met. I'm asking you if you talked to Machine-A? You said, ‘They've not come around yet. They are not there yet.

JB: That was from the first show! Yeah, exactly. Now, other than Raf [Simons], we're the best selling brand in Machine-A. I mean, it's funny how things come around. We saw Stavros and we said to each other how things have changed. I just thought we were not for the store, it wasn't really his thing and that’s okay. He is amazing. The way that he thinks about new brands, the way that he champions London. Especially at the moment, because London at the moment, is not an easy place. And I think it's amazing what he does and how significant what he does.

M-C Hill: We're beginning to see the bad side of what people who voted to remain could see, right? Six years ago.

JB: Yeah, we're only getting it now. It's tough. It's not an easy time. Stavros, has been really clever in the way he markets to keep consistency. It's amazing how things come around. There are some other stores which will reveal themselves. We're quite ambitious, but maybe foolish in other ways. We push into places and we do things and we do womenswear, we do all sorts of things without really considering it. We just do it.

M-C Hill: The casting! You made an active decision to cast the shows yourselves. Luca was saying, ‘It's because we couldn't afford to pay an agency. We know what we want out of our models, so why don't we just find it?’ And so you do. Every season you take these trips and find these people you like because you know that they'll work for your world. There's that Italo-Anglo cleverness again, where ‘we are skint af and can't keep spending money we don’t have.’ So what we'll do is use that cleverness again.

JB: I'm processing what you're saying…it's true. We do work with casting. We work in both of those ways. So we obviously work with casting agencies and all these things, and then there are some trips still happening as you know. We've got, not a book, a kind of database at this point full of the most amazing people: Berlin, Paris, London, Naples, now in Milan. There was an idea to go to Eastern Europe, to Bosnia. To keep it fresh!

M-C Hill: How did Tommy Cash come into this show?

JB: I want people to feel empowered to put their own interpretations on what we do. And I think Tommy is great for that because he's very much his own person.You can't movement direct Tommy Cash. You just can't. He's his own thing. I love that about him. What he does for Rick [Owens] and for Diesel, I really respond to it. He arrived in wedge crocs, a pink, fluffy bathrobe in 32° heat. He took the robe off and just had a pair of underwear on. So it's performative, but it's the real deal. He's fucking mental.

M-C Hill: Could it be argued that the way you explained Tommy Cash is the way to explain what you and Luca do?

JB: Exactly. And that's why there's an alignment. It's different, but it's the same.

M-C Hill: Jordan, you're never afraid to have a genuine conversation in the face of commerce. This is your authenticity, right? This is your life.

JB: We're not more honest or less honest, but I think we present our own truth differently. I think we present our truths in a way that's quite unique to us. Maybe it's a boring conversation, but who cares, really? But that's us. That's been us for the last 15 years. I've been in recovery now, so it's very much about presenting that version of my truth, my process.