Carter Altman’s spring-summer 2026 outing for Carter Young walks a delicate line between prep and sentimentality.
Titled The Swimmer, the collection wades into the wake of John Cheever’s 1964 short story and, inevitably, Burt Lancaster’s disquieting 1968 film turn as the suburban Odysseus in Speedos. But Altman’s protagonist is less pool-hopper, more a memory walking upright.
Captured by photographer Ellis Scott against the washed-out geometry of seaside suburbia, Raad Al Gabril and Kofi Couston model a wardrobe of tailored imperfection.
Blazers are boxy and paper-crumpled, shorts are pleated and voluminous, and ties hang not with conviction but with suggestion. A khaki trench coat, styled over a button-down and slate trousers, seems to conceal something unraveling beneath. There’s a sense of a uniform coming apart, not violently but by erosion.
Altman’s language is one of subverted Americana: the collegiate polo now rendered in pointelle knit, the banker’s pinstripe worn with a shrug. Trousers break wide over square-toe shoes, evoking both mid-century stiffness and millennial rebellion.
For all the dry irony embedded in these garments, there’s a tenderness too. Altman doesn’t lampoon his references. He deconstructs them with care. The result feels like a postscript to the American Dream, tailored with equal parts skepticism and affection.
If Lancaster’s Ned Merrill swam through the suburbs to find nothing left, Carter Young’s man walks through them with full knowledge of what was never really there.
Carter Young Spring/Summer 2026 Collection
