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, that 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 his main garment that is worn in winter, covering his many intricate layers in one large piece of wool insulating his body, but most of the people he encounters in the winter, will see him only in his coat, the key to his newfound identity as he enters adulthood.
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, its tailored silhouette trimly fits the male body with a high collar, tall cuffs and an asymmetrical opening, its 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 it can only be reinvented 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 on 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.
