Should you put sh*t in your pockets?

Welcome back to THE RADAR, The Prep Club’s fortnightly mini-magazine keeping you in the loop of what’s hip in the sphere of collegiate threads. You can attend last week’s meeting here for a view into towns without fashion scenes.

Here’s what’s on the radar this week:

— Do full pockets reduce your sauce?

— Ralph Lauren SS27 is… …ok

— Tennis trainers wearable off-court

— JFK’s G1 jacket, and why defining your style is a bad idea

Round these parts we operate on a basis that maximising functionality is a core tenet of a great relationship with fashion. Obviously it’s not exactly revolutionary to suggest that our clothes should offer us utility beyond obscuring our genitals, where this gets interesting is in the interplay between practicality and aesthetics, when we choose to defer to one or the other, whether they are in tension or harmony.

One of the most oblique examples of this push and pull is the question of utilising pockets or not. Given I am masculine presenting and wear men’s trousers, fashion traditions mean I am afforded the option of putting things in my front trouser pockets. This is, generally speaking, great for utility, but poor for aesthetics. Especially these days, the sorts of things we’re likely to carry in twenty-twenty-six don’t really suit the trouser pocket; a large mobile phone, big car key fob, or card-stuffed wallet brings with it swathes of aesthetic challenges. In the case of lighter fabrics, linen or well-washed chino cloths, whatever sits in the pocket is liable to disrupt the line of the pants, for jeans it may bulge through the fabric or result in the greatest aesthetic misstep of having to writhe around in a restaurant or train seat to retrieve the contents of said pocket.

I’ve seen enough pictures of what keeping your wallet in a back pocket does to your spine to steer clear of that option too. Convenience demands that the front ones stay in use when the phone in there doesn’t risk them falling down, but I’m never that happy about it.

On the other hand, I feel very different about jacket pockets. About keeping a wallet and a mobile on the inside sure, but also about stuffing the front pockets with whatever I’ve bought from a shop, a bottle of something or other, maybe a notebook if there’s room, or a pair of gloves in winter. I love the way that jacket pockets crease and buckle around those sorts of things, and I love keeping my hands free. I’m very happy to keep my sunglasses in my shirt pocket, or a soft ball-cap in the kangaroo pocket on a hoodie.

So, I think it matters much more what exactly you’re putting in your pockets, rather than if you are at all. Having a massive smartphone just isn’t cool these days, we accept it as a sort of necessary evil but the days of Apple Store queues are long gone. Same with bulky wallets or modern car keys, there’s no romance there sadly, just lurid, twenty-first century techno-monotony. Meanwhile interesting pocket contents, when they are there genuinely, of course, have about them a care-free attitude, or a sense of ease: quiet, just-so preparedness. It’s being able to applaud because your drink isn’t in your hand, it’s not having to look after a bag when you’re going out for dinner. It’s not about whether you have things in your pockets, it’s about what you’re carrying, and why.

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Ralph have fielded another men’s ready-to-wear show, hardly surprising given the huge publicity and vast praise they got for their return to the men’s runway in the Winter just past. They’ve kept the joint Polo/Purple Label format, which is still pretty neat, at times RL’s brands have felt so isolated from one another. There’s still a very clear divide between the two mind, whilst they may be presented as two sides of the Ralph coin, it seems clear there’s no intention for them to be blended.

Overall, I’m feeling whelmed, there obviously wasn’t the surprise value that came along with the winter show, and the styling is similar, though not quite the same— that’s important and we’ll get back to it. Ralph has had an established visual language for decades, so I was never expecting a radical shift, and they do a nice job of working in their lane without becoming parodies of themselves.

There were some real standout pieces, that Purple Label basketweave field jacket is stunning and completely unlike anything I’ve seen before. I’m not rich enough to wear evening wear at any time besides New Year’s Eve, so most of that stuff meant very little to me, except for the patchwork indigo jacket which is so very good and so quintessentially Ralph, it’s got uncovered buttons too so I reckon that’s game with a regular shirt and tie for a wedding if you’re looking for an excuse to pick it up. Those Polo indigo patchwork chinos, lovely.

That said, there’s something about this show that just doesn’t sit quite right. What I was taken with during the winter show was just how wearable the looks were, even if they were pretty out there. A runway show needn’t necessarily show how ready-to-wear could be worn, yet with the FW26 show it felt like it did, and with this show it feels like it doesn’t. Some of the more radical evening wear looks just don’t do it for me, the sukajan, checked jacket, biker jacket, and floral trousers come off as odd choices, and I don’t like that pennant patchwork jacket, especially with bright green socks. The last five or so looks remind me of being in charge of visual merchandising in a shop towards the end of a season, when the combinations start getting really bizarre so as to avoid repeating looks from earlier in the year. I like that brief divergence into the recency-ish looks, I kind of wish that visual language had a bigger role in the show as a whole, or was even spun off into it’s entire own thing. With the Polo looks, a lot of the layers read as impractical or a bit silly. A shawl collar cardigan over a jumper with another jumper tied around the bag is something you can get away with for a winter show, but looking at it styled with shorts and sat with temperatures tickling the back of 100° just makes beads of sweat appear on my brow. I’m left wondering how long it takes to get in and out of a rugby atop an anorak atop some other checked layer, with another windbreaker tied around the waist, and why is that guy wearing two shirts?… You get the picture. Also, neckerchiefs piss me off so they just got minus points on a matter of taste unfortunately.

I left the FW show feeling really inspired by the styling, this time around I’m feeling a lot more moved by the pieces, I don’t think there’s a look or a styling inflection I want to steal like there was last time out. Part of this might be that the Ralph house style of being very heavily layered just doesn’t translate as well to summer dressing, but it feels like less consideration was made this time towards having looks that work both on and off the runway and I think that’s a shame. I still want those patchwork chinos though.

It’s quite hard to establish the subject of this piece since, as I understand it, a pretty sizeable chunk of the States know “tennis shoes” as any sort of athletic shoe. That’s not what I’m on about here, I want to narrow down on specific shoes for tennis.