_J.L-A.L_'s FW25 Menswear Is on Another Planet (EXCLUSIVE)
_J.L-A.L_'s Fall/Winter 2025 menswear presentation was a bonanza of incredibly stylish and highly advanced technical menswear, to simply put it.
The leading inspiration for _J.L-A.L_ FW25 is La Planète Sauvage, a 1973 animated film that actually translates to Fantastic Planet. Nearly every aspect of the movie is incorporated into the label's techy menswear, including the stop-motion-like production. _J.L-A.L_ created crystal hoodies intended to move in the same manner as the animation.
Those sea urchin bags? They're inspired by those "little weird objects" in the movie. "Almost no one wanted to make it for us. And we almost had to go to a toy factory to get it made. But we managed to find someone in Italy willing to do it on a larger scale," Jean-Luc A. Lavelle told Highsnobiety.
But the weirdly cool handbags weren't the only great thing about _J.L-A.L_ FW25. The rest of the collection was a feast of unexpected fabric manipulations and patterns, like triple-layered suiting and footwear crafted with contoured calf hair.
_J.L-A.L_ also created bespoke gradient wool with the Italian mill Manteca. At the same time, the label enlisted designer Victoria Ohanyan to create beaded belts, bag straps, and waist embellishments.
Jean-Luc's intrigue with menswear stems from his disdain for it, believe it or not. "Each season, we try to incorporate more elements of things that we previously didn't like. And then we try to put them through our lens to see if we actually want to wear them now."
He previously loathed shearling, which got a clever flip by the brand this season. "The entire thing's been laser perforated, raw edge cut instead of folded, so you get these nice inflections of the hair coming out all of the cuffs and hands," Jean-Luc says.
"Then, the laser perforation gives it this really interesting, almost fleece-like look on the inside, but it's all 100% shearling."
For FW25, _J.L-A.L_ also reconnected with old friends. Notably, the brand collaborated with Goldwin, also Jean-Luc's first proper design job, for a new capsule and yet another full circle moment. _J.L-A.L_ also cooked up another chunky HOKA sneaker, a Mafate X, in two quietly good colorways. The _J.L-A.L_ collab will mark the first-ever fashion team-up for HOKA's highest-performance shoe yet.
But first, we'll need those "frosted" _J.L-A.L_ x Clifton 9 sneakers for the spring.
