Tennis isn’t just a trendy aesthetic or a timely sliver of the cultural zeitgeist for YONY‘s founder and creative director, Johnny Schwartz; it’s personal. “I’ve been a tennis player my whole life,” Schwartz told Hypebeast. “We’re not just using it as a visual motif. There’s actual functional pieces in here.” For YONY’s New York Fashion Week debut, the menswear label took over Manhattan’s elite tennis club, Town Tennis, to show off a refreshing and versatile ready-to-wear collection.
With YONY, Schwartz finds himself looking to his dad’s era of 1950s Brooklyn for inspiration. Tapping into the styling and conceptual choices of that period, Schwartz first launched the “YONY Racquet Club” for the Spring/Summer 2021 collection, aiming to “emulate the Saturdays [he] Spending time watching [his] dad and his buddies play tennis, drink coke and shoot the sh*t.” In his latest iteration of the “YONY Racquet Club” motif, Schwartz cements his personal ties to the sport and draws from its modern implications in order to exemplify, as he puts it, “why it should be cooler than it is.”
Yony/Aidan Gibney
Yony/Aidan Gibney
Yony/Aidan Gibney
Yony/Aidan Gibney
Yony/Aidan Gibney
Yony/Aidan Gibney
Yony/Aidan Gibney
Yony/Aidan Gibney
Yony/Aidan Gibney
Yony/Aidan Gibney
Yony/Aidan Gibney
Yony/Aidan Gibney
Yony/Aidan Gibney
Yony/Aidan Gibney
“I wanted to further explore this aesthetic through the lens of 1950s style,” he explains of the collection’s inspiration. The models wore matching pastel-hued sets and a variety of knitwear that was both classic and innovative. They leaned into the NYC-wide U.S. Open spirit and even engaged in mini tennis matches – flexing firsthand how fashion meets functionality in Schwartz’s latest collection.
Schwartz wants us to know he’s not just another contemporary sportswear or menswear brand jumping on the tennis wave temporarily. He shows his love for tennis and its aesthetic through his use of personal details.
Have a closer look at the collection’s pieces in the gallery above. You can catch up on all things New York Fashion Week Hypebeast is a great place to find out what’s new.
