AW25: Breeching
Initiations into Manhood, Uniform and the Breeched Boy: Victorian England’s Standard of Masculinity in Today’s Rugged Landscape.
“Breeching”, the title of my Autumn Winter 2025 capsule collection, is a term coined in the Regency era that continued to be used in the Victorian era as well. This practise was the transition from genderless childhood into manhood, in which upper class boys cast off their genderless frocks that were used to dress infants at the time, and don male breeches.
COAT01
The headline piece for my collection, what closes my “Breeching” is COAT01. Using only traditional tailoring techniques to finish this long coat, this piece represents the Man that wears my collection. The Breeching boy presenting into society. Not only is a coat our main garment that is worn in winter, covering our many intricate layers in one large piece of wool insulating our heat, but most of the people we encounter in the winter, will see only our coats.
SHIRT01
The essential layer in all boy’s uniforms, and a staple in a man’s wardrobe, the button down shirt is timeless. In my re-invention not only is the shirt made out of worsted wool, it’s tailored silhouette trimly fits the male body with a high collar, tall cuffs and an asymmetrical opening, it’s most noted feature being the seams of the sleeves not fully joined to the body, creating a cutout illusion when the model moves.
SHORT01
Admittedly, I saw the trouser as a tiresome garment, used repeatedly and can only be re invented so many times. The entire concept of ‘Breeching’ was the act of putting a child into trousers, separating the legs into their own woollen casing. SHORT01 echoes the first pair of trousers a victorian child would be put into, and makes reference to the traditional schoolboy’s shorts to play in the schoolyard.
APRON01
The final piece, using the same felted wool as the coat, is the long apron. I made the pattern based of a skirt pattern I learned how to draft when I became a tailor, and it is a skirt in all the technical aspects, but I decided to call it an apron. Not only for the connotations that a skirt has, especially in the context of menswear, but also to outline the irony of how garments are titled in general.
