Luke Leitch meets the menswear designers of Louis Vuitton, Z Zegna, and Rag & Bone - an elite quartet of British menswear designers who have swapped London for Paris, Milan and Manhattan.
And while their menswear - functional, well made and (a bit like New York during that first visit) edgy without being ridiculously dangerous - is more obviously informed by their own personal styles, these have been shaped by their adopted home city too. 'You can't help being inspired by New York. There's an awful lot going on here,' Wainwright says, before reeling off an authoritatively detailed breakdown of neighbourhood clothing codes from the polish of Upper East Side to the self-conscious roughness of Williamsburg.
'It's definitely becoming more and more gentrified,' Neville adds. 'Christopher Street, where we opened our first store because we couldn't afford to be on Bleecker Street, used to have a strong gay culture, but even in the past four or five years a lot of the more exotic businesses have had to leave because of rents. Properties keep getting developed and rents keep going up. It's a shame in a way. People always say that about gentrification, I know, but in some cases the character of the city is being pushed out.'
