FASHDSGN-Milan Fashion Week

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Milan Fashion Week: day one


By Vanessa Friedman


MaxMara taps Italy’s ‘golden age’ for inspiration, and Alberta Ferretti takes a fantastical undersea journey

On the first evening of Milan Fashion Week, a funny thing happened on the way past the Duomo.

There, in the piazza, 1,000 students, 30 models, various fashion houses and numerous startled passers-by gathered under the aegis of the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana to participate in a piece of performance art modelled after Michelangelo Pistoletto’s “Third Paradise” and dedicated to celebrating a new paper the CNMI had drawn up: “Manifesto for Sustainability of Italian Fashion”.

It’s about promoting the idea of – yes – sustainability in Italian fashion. Sustainability in the environmental/ production sense, but also in the business sense, suggesting that fashion is an industry that can sustain the Italian economy, and thus should itself be sustained.

Anyway, the models did their thing in different outfits from big Italian brands (Gucci, Zegna), and the students formed themselves into a brightly coloured representation of Mr Pistoletto’s new three-curve infinity symbol (the first curve is the first paradise – man in nature; the second, man in man-made artifice; and the third brings the two together), and its oddness made for a surprisingly apt metaphor for the start to the week.

Performance art, after all, is generally the sort of thing you expect to see in Paris or London, which tend to emphasise the creative over the commercial, as opposed to Milan, which mostly gets down to trend-setting-and-selling business. But lately business hasn’t quite been enough, so they’ve had to dress it up with extra dimensions; they’ve had to act out. But as the opening shows demonstrated, it isn’t always an easy alliance.

MaxMara, for example, is one of the most classic of all Italian names, famous for its way with a camel coat, and this time round it said the collection was “based on a number of very precise keywords, taken straight from the ‘golden age’ of the Made in Italy concept” – though what those words were was not entirely clear.

From the show notes they seemed to be “sport deluxe, colonial . . . and safari styles”, which appeared more Out of Africa than Made in Italy (the Olympics were represented too somehow), and from the show itself, the message was muddy.

To wit: safari silhouettes, reimagined in beige slouchy, short-sleeved, oversize suit jackets with epaulettes and pockets; body-conscious jumpsuits; trompe l’oeil combinations of blouson silk anoraks with stiff peplum bottoms; and eye-popping combinations of animal print ponyskin, madras gazar and neon florals. For evening, the same shapes came in black, with sheer backs and shoulders.

It was ultimately too tricksy for its own good. The brand would have been wiser to do what that other pillar of the Italian fashion establishment, Giorgio Armani, did in his Emporio Armani show: opt for “a way of . . . expressing yourself that is simple and natural”. Or, as the collection itself was called, “Neat”. In practice this meant a focus on shorts with tailored jackets, relaxed silk trousers, and tunics over miniskirts, all in earthen tones.

Aside from some weird side-wrapped tops that gaped unflatteringly under the arms, and a few droopy metallic knits (not to mention some large leather chokers best left backstage), the designer refrained from the more conceptual, and usually less successful, aesthetic experiments in which he occasionally indulges, and the clothes were better for it.

Meanwhile, Alberta Ferretti (along with Moschino, the high-fashion side of AEFFE, a publicly traded manufacturing powerhouse), where the eponymous designer built her name on lovely, red-carpet-ready pintucked gowns and oh-so-pretty daywear, went off in a fantastical direction, as symbolised by a video backdrop of rising bubbles and exploding sea anemone-like fronds.

This undersea foliage was represented, literally, on bodices bristling with beading and sequins, jewelled seaweed dangling from spaghetti straps, fringe trapped under an iridescent organza cover like a translucent jellyfish body, and lace in blues of many colours appliquéd on the sheerest tulle to create the illusion of a mermaid-like torso, sometimes descending into cigarette trousers, but oftentimes finished by an oily-slick of a lamé skirt, reminiscent of a fishy tail. A few dresses even came with their own bejewelled nets, the better to catch consumers, presumably.

Amid all the nymphiads there was an occasional restrained and elegant silk car coat with hidden closure, a white slip dress piped in black – but such practical garments were the exception rather than the rule.

As a result, delicate and filigree and rife with natural references as the rest of the collection was, it was difficult to see how, given the demands of contemporary life on women's’ wardrobes, it could be – well, sustained.



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Milan Fashion Week: day two




Miuccia Prada proves you don’t need to be new to have new ideas, Rossella Jardini returns to the 1960s and Etro blends ‘strong’ with the desire to be ‘decorative’

Italy has stagnation on the mind – and not just because of the economy. The fashion industry, long dominated by the same names and brands, has been grumbling for seasons about the lack of fresh blood, talent, ideas: the stuff that gets consumers excited about discoveries and sends them into stores to buy.

After all, the youngest designers to have broken through since the start of the millennium are design duo Aquilano Rimondi, who show on Saturday, and they are in their forties.

On day two of the Milanese collections, however, fashion began to take things into its own hands.

There was Vogue’s equivalent of quantitative easing, Who’s On Next and Vogue Talents. This is a “talent show” of numerous young designers from around the world, not left to fight their way through on their own, but discovered by Italian Vogue and presented to retailers and editors alike. The Vogue-anointed designers will be forcefully injected into the fashion world by sponsors such as Value Retail (which will stock the work of 10 participants) and Yoox.com (which will stock one).

And there was Prada, where Miuccia Prada proved once again that you don’t need to be new to have new ideas.

For spring/summer she said she was thinking about “women, and what is forbidden them, and the two sides of them – the poetic part and the toughness – and how they have to behave”.

This does not sound particularly radical (it even sounds a bit clichéd) but its expression was a
volte face from the geometric print pantsuit riot of last season, not least in its combination of extreme simplicity and intense stylisation. Plus, of course, its wedding of the apparently conceptual to the essentially commercial. The latter has long been Prada’s big idea; what’s new each season is how she makes the same
thing look – let’s use a new word – fresh.

Almost entirely in black and white with touches of red (and the very occasional shot of navy, forest green and palest pink or mint), the collection featured a highly accessible, slightly frumpy, silhouette – round-necked, straight skirt to the thigh or knee, three-quarter length sleeves – with a kind of square folded “canvas” at the torso on which was appliquéd a white outline of a flower, like a chalk drawing.

These later appeared on slick city shorts and car coats and neat jackets, came in chrysanthemum-floral digital prints and embroidered decoration, and finally bloomed tone-on-tone on satin tunics and miniskirts.

Although the pieces referenced many things Japanese, from origami to kimonos, Prada said it wasn’t calculated; she liked the symbolism of the flower and the structure of the folds.

She also liked – ahem – the idea of summer fur. To be specific, astrakhan and mink, which came in jackets and coats with intarsia Warhol-like flowers. “We [women] are not supposed to be decadent,” she said by way of explanation. “We’re not supposed to splurge.”

So she wanted to. You can read that as rebellious – she’s not going to submit to austerity measures – or a canny way to extend the life of this collection. It does, after all, get delivered to stores in the cold winds of February and March, when a consumer might, actually, want to buy a coat instead of a slip dress.

It was certainly a more multi-dimensional solution, aesthetically and economically, to the current situation than that offered by Moschino, where designer Rossella Jardini returned, yet again, to the 1960s. (When did this decade of risk and revolution become a style safety net?) She did this via graphic black and white minidresses and coats, and nifty little trouser suits, all also popping up sprinkled with hearts, disco mirrors, and – what a surprise – flower power.

The soundtrack said it all: “let’s just have a good time”, as though dressing happy could make it so. But does anyone really believe such a simplistic approach works any more? Doubtful. Not even in the superficial land of clothes.

At least at Etro, things were slightly more complex, graphically if not structurally. Hand-painted silks and cottons moved from garden florals through sequined stripes until a chrysalis became a butterfly, all of it layered on Japanese-inspired shapes.

If it was overly literal, it was also almost entirely ye-olde-paisley-and-hippie free, and at least trying to make sense of two different imperatives; the need to be “strong” and the desire to be “decorative”, in the words of designer Veronica Etro.

“The point is: keep on dreaming but keep your feet on the ground,” she said. As if there were any other choice.




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Milan Fashion Week: day three


Dolce & Gabbana opt for ‘sun, sea and love’; Emilio Pucci jettisons jet-set chic; Jil Sander goes back to basics; Marni does shape-teasing; Fendi is crips, clean and energetic; Versace fails to convince as a boho rebel

Does sex still sell in Mario Monti’s Italy? That question forms the subtext of the Milanese spring/summer collections. After all, sex – the celebration of – was long a hallmark of many Italian houses, even in years before Silvio Berlusconi made it a part of the daily conversation.

Brands that didn’t overtly address the issue were defined by their opposition to it; the option for consumers who wanted to Just Say No.


Now that No is the word of the moment, however, has the alternative been given the upper hand? Are we in a post-sex state, not just politically, but sartorially too? Over the weekend, the answer was looking a lot like Yes.

When even Dolce & Gabbana, the house that built an empire on body-baring Siciliana, trades corsets and lingerie for “sea, sun and love,” aka a nostalgia-filled funfest of below-the-knee silk dresses in primary coloured puppetry prints; rough linen smocks painted like flour sacks or gorgeously embroidered in coral; awning stripes and pom-poms; and even basket weave bustiers, something is going on.

When Emilio Pucci, a champion of the plunge-neck jet set, touts the benefits of “strength on the inside and serenity on the outside”, it’s no coincidence. Granted, in Pucci’s case this seemed more theory than practice, as bodies were veiled in layers of white-on-white embroidered chinoiserie chiffon, itself veiled in another layer of transparency, and trouser suits were so sheer the seams provided the only cover. But the intent was there. (More protected, if dangerously courting cliché, were sportswear-inspired satin jumpsuits and army kimonos embroidered with gold dragons and tigers.)

The most relevant shows were the ones that eschewed flesh and flash for an altogether more strategic approach.

Beginning with the return of Jil Sander to the house that bears her name after eight years (she left because of creative differences with then-owner, the Prada Group). “Re-set to zero,” read her show notes, but she created a continuum both with her own past at the house and the work of her predecessor, Raf Simons, and his fascination with old couture. Using her signature purist idiom – white shirts, navy coats, neat trousers – she added an easy, curvilinear structure that looked happenstance but was built into a garment, so a coat might bell out at the back as though formed by a gust of air; a black shirt over matching trousers end in a half-moon swoop at the back; and a superb pair of marine blue shirtdresses tucked to drape just so.

If the finale of white cotton pieces polka-dotted with holographic plastic discs felt forced, overall these were the kind of minimally lush clothes that draw women, but men find puzzling; the shapes tease the contours of the body such that what you see gives no clue as to what you might get.

Just as they often do Marni, where designer Consuelo Castiglione used cotton and jacquard in oversize shapes, so squared-off tunics and dresses stood away from the body, embracing it occasionally via folds, but most often obscuring it. Bright wallpaper florals spackled with sequins and picnic blanket checks were the only prints in a sea of bloc colours that proved too enveloping to intrigue.

Still, the clothes shared a certain aerodynamic feel with Fendi, where Karl Lagerfeld relaxed into his best collection in seasons. Though his ready-to-wear for the house can seem as tricksy as the dazzling furs, this time around a focus on sportiness (designers seem helpless against the Olympic effect) in the form of drawstring waists and simple T-shirt and short shapes, and architecture, especially the Bauhaus and the coloured graphics of the Memphis movement, streamlined his tendency to complicate.

Dresses came with thick contrasting stripes at the seams and edges; leather was treated as casually as a fleece, and exploding super nova prints were left alone to form the bright point on a simple organza minidress and an extraordinary shaved fur coat. The result was crisp and clean and energetic. It couldn’t be bothered with stopping to flirt; it was too busy moving forward.

Which made for a contrast with Versace’s unconvincing threesome of silk and lace and boho rebel chic. Dresses, suit jackets and shorts in the first, most often in crinkled black, came sliced with swaths of the second, as did jeans, occasionally slumming with studded belt and straps, segueing into tie-dye versions of the same, and cutaway goddess dresses dripping metallic fringe. Lacking structure the clothes lacked their usual giddy physical power, and felt . . . flaccid. Even a technocrat wouldn’t want that.

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2012.



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