To This Artist, Menswear Is a Canvas (EXCLUSIVE)

The only difference between Ages’ Paris Fashion Week showroom and an artist’s atelier is that clothing, not canvases, are the conduit for creativity. Black trousers hid flashes of color beneath flaps of fabric, tees were laced up like corsets, and the designer himself was clad in a button-up hand-painted white like a Rothko canvas.

It’s fitting that Ages’ showroom had a gallery feel. Founder Taylor Spong isn’t just a fashion designer and a tailor; first and foremost, he’s an artist.

In his art, Spong reimagines construction-grade materials — drywall, house paint, modular wall panels — into works that abstractly capture experiences through color, texture, and shape. This construction-as-process approach informs Spong’s label, as Ages’ semi-industrial compositions innovate upon the ordinary.

Recognizable menswear staples like T-shirts, overcoats, and slacks are hand-painted, shredded, re-paneled, and unexpectedly woven to yield new structures from old forms.

One denim jacket’s double-zippered placket extended far beyond the collar, folding over the front of the chest. A classic unstructured blazer was unexpectedly cut from cotton ripstop and fitted with contrasting pocket flaps that lay the garment’s make bare — delicate serger stitching outlines everything.

And SS27’s hero piece, the hand-painted shirt worn by Spong, felt like a mission statement for his label at large, which also produces furniture, not least because it looked like one of his artworks molded into a wearable object.

Now, as the designer straddles the worlds of fashion and art — with a debut exhibit at Brooklyn’s D.D.D.D. ongoing while he hosts this Paris showroom — Ages is taking shape. Spong’s take on the wardrobe staple counters convention by applying a twist of personality.

The perspective-driven accents, the yellow collar of a work jacket or wrinkled cotton used for an overcoat, don’t detract from Ages’ wearability. And there are still plenty of top-tier quarter-zips and collared shirts of the decidedly classic variety. Because, to Ages, that is fashion: the basic, reborn.

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