mfpen FW23: Quiet? Yes. Luxury? Literally
Like so much of the rest of the fashion-conscious world, I am exhausted by the phrase "quiet luxury." It's overused, nebulous, and, at worst, lionizes a class of people who're best ignored.
Danish fashion brand mfpen technically qualifies as "quiet luxury" in the stylistic sense of the term, in the sense that its bouclé coats, urbane cardigans, and pleated slacks epitomize the sense of IYKYK cool that quiet luxury may have once signified.
But mfpen's sense of luxury comes exclusively in terms of quality, producing clothes that are luxurious in the sense that they're made to an objective standard of craft. Simply put, MFpen makes real clothes for real people with real style to really wear, for real.
That's always been core to the brand's ethos, to be fair. Like, there's a reason that mfpen Fall/Winter 2023 bears similarities to mfpen Fall/Winter 2022.
But especially with so many clothing brands desperate to reinvent themselves season after season, to chase trends, to capitalize on "moments," how refreshing it is to instead see a brand addressing fashion waste by honing its output to a laser focus, exclusively producing modular capsules that fluidly interweave season to season.
Bonus points to mfpen for also primarily utilizing deadstock fabrics for its Italian and Portuguese-made clothes.
Any clothes not made of an existing wool, linen, polyester, or cotton are fashioned from organic and recycled textiles — this season, for instance, mfpen highlighted a coat made of "100% recycled post-consumer wool."
Stylistically, mfpen FW23 draws from "artists of the post-punk and new wave," including archetypical artists like Talking Heads' David Byrne and Joy Division's Ian Curtis. Think early-'80s Killing Joke, both in the ethos and appearance, and you're getting there.
In the same sense that those artists inverted conventional, staid musical tropes, mfpen represents the inverse of "quiet luxury" as the term is commonly defined. Or perhaps it's truest form of the phrase.
See, mfpen sidesteps the conspicuous consumption inherent to so many "luxury" labels, quiet or otherwise, because it's purely focused on the clothes. Paradoxically, this approach actually gets mfpen closer than most to the core of the idea that originally spawned quiet luxury: taste recognizes taste.
Perhaps we ought to come up with an alternative phrase. How about, "great clothes?"
