In addition to our love of Honey I Shrunk The Kids, Ant-Man, The Matrix, 1984 and Catch 22, we’re also pretty keen on Paul Smith’s latest collection, Army Of Ants, because it’s filled with some great looking designs. By channeling some of our natural affection for, aversion to, indifference of and parallels with the little mandible crunching warrior drones, the British designer has build a solid and brilliantly repetitive motif.
Impressively, he’s also managed to build in a good amount of variation into the collection, while also have a uniformity that strings everything together. It’s both a joke and a serious comment on a number of levels making it a very rare instance of thought provoking attire, which is pretty novel. Luckily, it also looks cool too and here’s our pick of the collection for anyone that wants to saddle up the ant horde.
The ant army pattern shirt above is our favourite item in the collection. From a distance it looks like a sharp spot pattern, which you can see in the image at the top of the page, but as soon as you get close enough it blurs into the sartorial insect invasion that it is. The pattern is more complex than you might be inclined to give it credit for initially, but if you take a closer look (image below) you can see the asymmetric detail is more random and varied than you might expect. It’s available in black on white print, white on black and grey on navy and they’re all very stylish.
Giving a new twist to the classic cotton-pique polo shirt, the Paul Smith Army Of Ants equivalent throws a large ant insignia in the place of the breast logo that has become the norm. It’s as bold as a rain-forest moving carpet invasion and looks smart with a slightly subversive edge.
It leads in well to the large, block placements in the jumper section of the collection, which includes the sweatshirt and sweater below. There are dust pink and ecru equivalents of these respectively, but they don’t look as impressive as the black options.
Both of the t-shirt colour selections (ecru on black and black on white) work well with a lot of fun built into their design. They’re simple, clever and very stand-out if you’re looking for a less conventional, high-impact design.
The black and white holdall above is also pretty smart, but it’s one of the priciest items in the collection at an antenna watering £485. It’s a price tag that just keeps it out of our list of coolest men’s holdalls, but for anyone with very deep pockets looking for something fairly unique to carry their weekend away wear then it might be worth a look.
The last item in our pick of the best from the Paul Smith Army Of Ants collection is the flashy ant cuff-links above, which are a work of genius. They’ve got an intricate finish in the silvery chrome sheen and have the Paul Smith signature embossed T-bar fastenings for good measure.
