JORDANLUCA SS24 Is "About the Perspective of Life"

Before Jordan Bowen and Luca Marchetto unveiled their Spring/Summer 2024 show at Milan Fashion Week, the chatter was bouncing off the walls, reverberating about how fantastic the collection was going to be. It begged the question: can JORDANLUCA SS24 be even better than its stellar Fall/Winter 2023 presentation?

Somehow, the London-based duo hasn’t just done it again — it showed a fully realized, completely conceptualized, utterly definitive portrayal of what JORDANLUCA is and who it speaks to.

For SS24, the creative duo took inspiration from the humble but mighty lipstick. The classic shade of red has connotations of power and performance, but also (per the brand), “blood, life, murder, sex and death.” These were the themes of the collection, as JORDANLUCA presented its first full womenswear range alongside foolproof menswear identities that will go on to define the label for the years to come.

It felt self-referential, but elevated. Familiar, but totally refreshing. Never one to not take risks, the designers opened its show with track pants decorated with lace bumsters up top. The Estonian rapper Tommy Cash also walked the show in two looks, delivering a haunched and ethereal aesthetic that matched the attitude of his horizontal-zipper short shorts and loose silk shirt, like he’d just left the XXX nightclub.

As it is the season of the halterneck (à la Fendi and others), JORDANLUCA delivered its take on the womenswear staple transformed into a men’s summer number. Here, the top glistened in sparkling fabrics and folds, all of which was subverted by the flipped and reversed neck hole attached to the bottom part of the garment.

Womenswear cues were injected into menswear heavily, as jeans were low-waisted and belted with a cowboy’s buckle and scoop necks dug deep into the chest on tight-fitting knitted sweaters.

However, this was also contrasted by traditions: pleated slacks, Western boots, sweater vests with overly-revealing armpit holes, and lace was used consistently. Yet even here there was a twist, as racy, lacey silk was used to craft tiny little harnesses sitting atop sleeveless shirts bearing oversized collars, and sheer womenswear co-ords decorated in floral motifs were contrasted by the use of latex suffocating arms.

JORDANLUCA is known for playing into fetishes and kinks. For SS24, it was much more adult and informed, and for that, the brand really found its nuance. Here’s what Bowen and Marchetto had to say about the collection themselves:

Hypebeast: Let’s clear one thing up: why did you close on Lana Del Rey’s “hope is a dangerous thing for a woman like me to have — but I have it.”?

Jordan Bowen: Luca played Lana Del Rey’s song to me, he said, “what do you think to this?”

Luca Marchetto: I love that the song is about a story of this woman and, somehow, hope is dangerous for her. It’s really fascinating.

It connected to this collection because there’s a lot of philosophy in the collection. It’s about the perspective of life. What we’re doing with the brand is looking at the now; where can it lead to?

While the future was clear, there was also a lot of self-referencing. 

JB: It was important for us to do it. We’ve now got womenswear (we have explored it before…) but it’s completely different. A different way of thinking, of designing. We had to go back to what we have established and we held on to that. It’s really tight and concise, with the colors and the way things went together. So you can get a real sense of, step-by-step, the journey of colors, cuts, browns, to blacks. It feels really fluid.

And as usual, you explored lots of cultural references. What came to mind for SS24?

LM: For the womenswear, we took the kilt. [We made] kilt jackets, kilt skirts, kilt dresses.

There were also references in the leather jacket with the roses. It felt dark.

We want to make a point of what JORDANLUCA is. It’s really important for us. We have some carryover but it’s of things that we love, that we recognize.

JB: I’ve always wanted to do a womenswear a bit. You always wonder what it would look like as a complete head-to-toe menswear, womenswear… what does it mean to do both of those things fully?

Oh, and Tommy Cash. How did you get involved?

Tommy Cash: Suprise!