When Is a Flannel Shirt Not a Flannel Shirt?—And Other Existential Questions of 2022

It’s impossible for me, at least, to look at Blazy’s “flannel shirt”—one of the most thought-provoking designs of 2022—without making a connection to another famous flannel-adjacent top, the sand-washed printed silk one Marc Jacobs showed in his spring 1993 grunge collection for Perry Ellis, which in retrospect might be correctly described as perversely banal too. In 1992 the flannel shirt was already an acknowledged symbol of grunge in the world apart from fashion; in the 30 years between Jacobs’s and Blazy’s collection, the Seattle/thrift-shop aesthetic was canonized. (After all, how many runway rehashes of grunge have we seen?)

We know that around the time that Jacobs designed that silk “flannel” he had been going to see grunge bands play, so the reference was pretty direct; a sort of one-to-one ratio. Industry folks and scenesters alike were riled. Suzy Menkes distributed campaign buttons that read “Grunge is Ghastly,” and after Vogue ran the “Grunge & Glory” portfolio in the December 1992 issue, one of our readers ranted: “I tell you, it makes kids like me want to give up when the music we believe in becomes big business…. It’s not about fashion, it never was. It’s about music, our music and our ‘grungy’ clothing, not just some Calvin Klein design that someone decided to wear wrinkled because they wanted to be wild.”

With the exception of Giles Deacon’s brief stint at Bottega Veneta, it’s never been a go-to brand for the wild child. At one point the company’s tagline was “When your own initials are enough.” Blazy’s leather flannel and denim also leverage the celebrated craftsmanship of the house, but take it in a different, more casual, and surprising direction.

As I tried to parse Blazy’s “flannel,” René Magritte’s masterpiece, The Treachery of Images, kept surfacing in my mind’s eye. The painting, featuring a realistic rendering of a pipe with the legend “C’est ne pas un pipe,” questions our perception of reality. Similarly, Blazy’s design is a flannel shirt which is and is not a flannel shirt all at once. The thing about Blazy’s “flannel”—and Magritte’s painting for that matter—is that it needs words to be understood. What Roland Barthes, the French semiologist, once described as the “image garment” (the visual representation of an object) and the “word garment” (its description) must coexist. You wouldn’t know from looking that the Bottega Veneta shirt wasn’t made of woven cotton, the marvel of the look-alike leatherwork can only be appreciated by description or by touch/interaction with the object itself.