Do you know what a camel is?
Someone once said that a camel is a horse designed by a Board of Experts…
Well, our TRAILBLAZER is one of those hybrid species from Weirdsville, courtesy of the MF® Design Department. Working on FW2019 last year, the initial intention of our in-house Board of Experts was to release a winter version of the SECOYA Shirt, merely updating the light ounce chambray to a heftier fabric option. So much for that easy-breezy plan…
Ideas started flowing, such as making the shirt full open front, and using metal grommets instead of stitched eyelets for ventilation.
I had quickly dismissed a suggestion by Tina from Bazar a few weeks back, pointing out the practical aspect of “a shirt with added slash pockets”, just because her pitch had started with “you know what you should do?” That idea popped back up on the drafting table during our design meeting. A few cups of brain juice later and we had a few rough sketches for the “kangaroo” pockets and front button placket, which materialized later into the mfsc TRAILBLAZER courtesy of Sensei Fukutomi San, pattern maestro of Toyo Enterprises.
We had been contemplating for a while using Brushed Cotton Sateen for an mfsc project, a popular textile for casual sportswear in the 1960’s-70’s, and a big hit in Europe at the time. The leisure suit collector and vintage fashion gourmet will relate to funky-fresh Lee® trucker jackets with matching bottoms, and to the plethora of off-brand flare jeans and shirt-jaks cut from that glorious textile, in a wild palette of pastel of bold colors. This would be our fabric of choice for our camel.
The FW2019 TRAILBLAZER fabric is a weft-faced brushed sateen, a tightly woven twill with a characteristic soft brushed satin weave face and a plain weave reverse. We opted for two complimenting colors, Prussian blue and rust, lifted from two vintage garments from the MF® vintage archives.
If the rest of the specifics of the Secoya Shirt are still there – double-shoulder yoke, selvedge gussets, chin strap, and combo of assorted colorful tin-pressed buttons – the mfsc TRAILBLAZER is in a league of its own. With the four front pockets contrasting with the rounded shirttail panels typical of vintage tuck-in style shirting, the garment had morphed into an overshirt. Blending 1930’s details and 1970’s fabrics, the vibe of our TRAILBLAZER is somewhat reminiscent of early California climbing and mountaineering (see The Stonemasters), rather than the initial early workwear vibe of its Secoya predecessor.
The MF® TRAILBLAZER is designed in California by Mister Freedom® Board of Experts and manufactured in Japan by Sugar Cane Co.
