MONCLER: Snowy Summer
Photo Courtesy Marcus Tondo
Thom Browne was taking us from the snow and slopes to the sun and sand, highlighting the brand’s versatility and, as a corollary, the global nature of today’s luxury consumer.
MSGM: Urban Jungle
Photo Courtesy Alessandro Garofalo
Giorgetti is always very current, designing pieces that hit that sweet spot of trendy and sporty. This season, he issued acid bright floral prints strewn across nylon anoraks; layered shiny slickers under structured blazers; and paired baseball caps with oversized pullovers. In short, the urban jungle is his jam.
N21
Photo Courtesy Yannis Vlamos
The word written in capital letters across a No. 21 cotton sweatshirt at today’s show was nonchalance, which is quite an elusive attitude. It differs from indifference; it’s not about superficiality. It’s mostly associated with the ability to take things lightly, soaring above the harshness of our reality
PHILIPP PLEIN
Photo Courtesy Luca Tombolini
Plein genuinely goes his own way. And even though that way absolutely isn’t my way—no way!—his personal blend of braggadocio and balls, plus a taste level so unabashedly trashy it’s almost genius, has seen him carve out a niche it is hard not to admire. Plus he’s an interesting guy to talk to.
DOLCE & GABBANA
Photo Courtesy Yannis Vlamos
#Boycott Dolce & Gabbana? Oh no, not again. What had Domenico and Stefano said now? Some of the runway walkers and all of the backstage staff, plus the designers themselves, wore T-shirts urging a boycott of the brand.
“It’s irony! A joke!” Dolce said backstage before the show. “People use heavy words very easily these days. There is too much aggression. We think what the world needs is love—and for us, fashion is love.”
DSQUARED2
Photo Courtesy Monica Feudi
“It’s basically a leather bar on Christopher Street one fabulous summer night in the mid ’90s,” observed a wise and richly experienced colleague as we grabbed a vodka cocktail and stumbled out from this pulsatingly jam-packed DSquared2 show.
PRADA
Photo Courtesy Monica Feudi
The aesthetic of the Prada show space at Via Fogazzaro is always highly anticipated, so we like to take a punt before seeing the runway. With the words ‘Draft Novel’ printed on the invitation, speculation ran rife from a library with pages of books glued to the wall (“Nah, Mrs Prada is never that literal”) to a train station fitted with street lamps (“Because you read books on the train”) but, in the end, the show space was covered with blown-up comic strips featuring monkeys shooting lasers from their eyes. Very X-Men meets Planet of the Apes.
FENDI
Photo Courtesy Luca Tombolini
This excellent collection nailed a tricky-to-pin sweet spot in the Venn diagram between conventionally wearable and perversely covetable. Silvia Venturini Fendi did this by blending banal but disparate menswear elements, zhoozhifying them via fabulous Fendi fabrication and a peppering of double-F branding, then finally adding an intriguing dusting of illustrations from the pen of “Big” Sue Tilley, the artist and once muse of Lucian Freud.
GIORGIO ARMANI: Made in Armani
Photo Courtesy Marcus Tondo
“Made in Armani” read the letters projected onto the runway backdrop. So apparently Giorgio Armani has founded his own nation-state—let’s call it Armania. After more than 40 years of carving out his own fashion topography as the single shareholder in Italy’s greatest privately held house, it makes perfect sense.
WOLF TOTEM: Wild Beauty
Photo Courtesy Imaxtree
Fashion designer Colin Jiang presented Wolf Totem‘s Spring Summer 2018 Wild Beauty collection, inspired by KAM handcrafting and popular architecture, as part of the ongoing Milano Fashion Week.
ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA: The Future is Bright
Photo Courtesy Marcus Tondo
It’s been a year since Alessandro Sartori took the reigns at Ermenegildo Zegna, with a mission statement to unify the various arms of the monolith Italian men’s house, and it’s clear that his feet are firmly under the table. Those feet are sneakered-up, because that’s the way his Zegna man rolls these days, combining sporting accents with soft-structured suits, and the table in question is a cutting table.
MARNI: Lost and Found
Photo Courtesy Luca Tombolini
The clothes, as Risso explained lyrically afterward, were meant to “surf the typography of a city,” “invoke diverse objects,” and acknowledge the “nobility of coincidences.” Knowing this might help make sense of the randomness with which sailboats appeared on suiting and Hawaiian floral motifs merged with bookish retro ones.