We first wrote about Robert Geller Collection when it launched in fall 2007. Since then, Geller has gone on to become one of the most watched American Menswear designers. At the time that we about wrote him, he was drawing inspiration from the French New Wave, specifically Godard’s Breathless. As Geller explained to PLANET then, he wanted to portray a sense of masculinity that was free, playful, and hadn’t been hemmed in. Yet he also wanted to show a vulnerability, which, after all, exists in any real man at any age. In his clothes and in his models, Geller was unabashedly drawn to youth — proto-males that were still evolving, or, as I wrote then, “slightly unformed creatures who were not yet certain to turn out good or bad.”
     In his Spring/Summer 2010 collection, presented Saturday at Exit Art in New York City, Geller is still looking to the past for inspiration, but once again as a way of reconstructing the present. As we work through our own economic midnight, Geller says he focused on the German 1950s for his collection’s theme — not that men dressed like this then, but rather, he would have liked them to. It was a time when Germany was picking itself up after the devastation of the war and, through the economic miracle known as Wirtschaftswunder, began emerging from that haunted past. The bold use of color, more pronounced than in previous Geller collections, is a symbol of the renewal of spring and its potential for redemption.