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Guy Trebay on Milan Fashion Week

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  • Faust
    kitsch killer
    • Sep 2006
    • 37852

    Guy Trebay on Milan Fashion Week



    You know what I love about this article? The fact that this part of Milan shows (and fashion) for us is a just a different and completely uninteresting universe.



    You know what I hate about this article? Another "Prada is an intellectual" comment. ENOUGH! [N]




















    June 28, 2007

    Fashion Review


    Looking Like a Billion Bucks











    MILAN




    HEDGE funds, hedge funds, hedge funds,? Richard David Story, the
    editor of Departures, the magazine for American Express premium
    cardholders, said before the Ferragamo show on Sunday when asked to
    account for the current mood in men?s fashion and what looks like newly
    set markers for giddy excess.




    To judge from all the $700 cotton poplin trousers (Bottega Veneta),
    $250 flip-flops (Hermès) and $20,000 satchels in matte tobacco
    crocodile (Tod?s) on offer, the fractional-jet-share crowd has coffers
    so deep that there?ll be plenty left over for chronographs or John
    Currin paintings.




    Whether these customers are real or imagined, the idealized notion
    of them appeared to dominate many designers? offerings for spring 2008,
    all pitched to a guy with both a high net worth and a 30-inch waist.




    ?Preppy deluxe? is how one editor characterized Tomas Maier?s solid
    collection of high-end slouch-wear for Bottega Veneta: glazed linen
    three-piece suits; rumpled jackets with zippered detachable sleeves;
    and soft bags in crocodile, ostrich and deerskin, which, the designer
    indicated, ?reflect the careless elegance of the clothing.?




    As in seasons past, Mr. Maier?s clothes were an elaboration of the
    insouciant formality that characterizes good Neapolitan tailoring.
    Still, they could also be mistaken for a billionaire?s version of the
    stuff from a J. Peterman catalog.




    That some version of that Bottega Veneta man ? lithe, young,
    carefree in his moneyed assurance ? seemed to be everywhere said
    something about the generally buoyant economic mood in Milan.




    His spirit was to be seen in Frida Giannini?s slick and
    well-orchestrated show for Gucci, which presented a tautened version of
    that same fellow and put him in graphic suits with madras cloth checks
    rendered in black and white, and trousers that sat just above the pubic
    bone and biker jackets with grommets and shoes with lethally pointed
    toes.




    He appeared again in shiny trench coats, knife-slim suits and a
    muted palette at the Versace show, designed this season by the
    Russian-born Alexandre Plokhov, formerly of Cloak. He was spotted at
    Roberto Cavalli?s unexpectedly restrained show held in a cavernous
    disco near Linate Airport wearing not the leopard spots and junky
    rocker paraphernalia one expects from this designer, but instead the
    subdued suits and the slouchy suede driving shoes favored by the
    Maserati crowd.




    Another avatar of the hedge-fund hottie turned out at Valentino?s
    brand-consistent presentation, notable as usual for natty Roman
    tailoring styled in a way that is often more than a little bit campy.
    Wasn?t that double-breasted white jacket nipped at the waist once a
    uniform of sorts among the high-end gigolos populating the piazzetta in
    Capri?




    Mr. Bigbucks was here again at the Salvatore Ferragamo show,
    conjured this time wearing sharp-edged suits of white cotton (with
    accompanying gloves), handsome tweedlike cotton blazers or faintly
    feminine evening clothes (a kind of shiny hoodie) that suggested a time
    in the future when it will be the man who needs help with his zipper
    before leaving the house.




    ?It?s more cool now to be refined,? said Massimiliano Giornetti, the
    young Ferragamo designer. ?It?s cool to wear a jacket again on the
    weekend and in the evening and in your spare time.?




    It is particularly cool if you happen to be in Milan when, in a
    not-altogether-accountable spirit of optimism, the city cracks open the
    oaken doors to its fabled palaces and cloisters and turns them into
    party rooms.




    On Saturday night a dinner was held for Nicolas Ghesquiere of
    Balenciaga beneath Tiepolo?s hallucinatory and superpopulated ceiling
    at the Palazzo Clerici. This was followed the next evening by a vast
    alfresco feast whose host was Franca Sozzani, the editor of Italian
    Vogue, honoring the painter Julian Schnabel, who is enjoying a
    retrospective here. The dinner drew from the worlds of fashion and
    politics and also from what is left of the local aristocracy, and was
    served at a series of long tables set inside the arcade of what at one
    time was a hospital for sufferers of the plague.




    For his first men?s wear show in Milan, the Belgian designer Dries
    van Noten took over the Caryatid Room at the Palazzo Reale, illuminated
    it with 1,500 candles and served guests plates of pasta before offering
    them a moody selection of clothes shown on models who paraded like
    sleepwalkers through a low-lying bank of manufactured fog.




    There were diaphanous raincoats of parachute silk and side-belted
    blouson shirts that vaguely recalled Russian Tea Room waiters. There
    were also boxing shorts and judo trousers, remade in matte satin and
    jewel colors that, however romantic they looked in the setting, would
    not be much help if our man found himself looking to get lucky or, for
    that matter, trying to flag down a taxi at 3 a.m.




    If, on the other hand, he had it in mind to slip on an
    apricot-colored parachute-silk skimmer, hop into a time machine and set
    the dial for New Haven circa 1984, he might glide to a graceful landing
    at a Yale seminar where earnest brainy sorts were ardently discussing
    something quaint like the butch-femme dyad or the future of men.




    Gender studies, of course, have gone the way of the dodo. Yet like
    that bygone creature they have an insistent way of insinuating
    themselves into our consciousness and our collective dreams. ?The
    concept of duality so dear to psychoanalysis and art in general,? read
    a press handout at Versace. ?This is the challenge facing the Versace
    man in the coming spring/summer 2008 season.?




    You don?t say. Even before the Versace man got there, many of us
    were puzzling over what to make of the tension between masculine and
    feminine dualities in sartorial self-expression and also wondering why
    it is that, for a lot of designers, Peter Pan seems to be the ideal
    man. How, for example, do you rationalize the success of Thom Browne,
    who won a men?s wear award from the Council of Fashion Designers of America in 2006 and who was recently hired by Brooks Brothers to help revamp the brand?




    You can?t argue with the influence Mr. Browne?s clothes have had on
    the industry, although he was surely not the first to make suits that
    suggested a Pee-wee Herman romp along Savile Row. At a garden party
    staged for a pictorial in the July/August issue of Departures, Euan
    Rellie, the husband of the fashion gadfly Lucy Sykes, is seen wearing a
    Thom Browne suit that has all of that designer?s trademark details:
    cropped jacket piped at the collar, lapel, hem and pocket; shirttails
    left hanging; bow tie.




    A caption identifies Mr. Rellie as an investment banker, and one
    would certainly have to be making a bundle to afford a get-up that cost
    $6,170, not including underwear, socks and shoes. Yet far from
    embodying a model of fiscal authority or contemporary chic, Mr. Rellie
    comes across in the picture as the man hired by the caterers to make
    balloon animals.




    With the notable exceptions of Dsquared and Armani, labels whose
    designers are unabashed in their appetite for manly types, a lot of
    shows this week cast models that looked as goofy as Mr. Rellie did and
    also far too young. This is probably as good a place as any to remark
    that, by returning to the clean tailoring, body-hugging lines and
    gimmick-free forms of his early career, Giorgio Armani
    produced his best show in a long time, one that had nothing to do with
    our general cultural infantilism, or what sometimes seems like a plot
    by the fashion cabal to get the Centrum Silver set to relinquish all
    hopes of growing old stylishly and to accept the inevitable orthotic
    inserts and elastic waists.




    EASILY the most aesthetically charged shows of the week were at
    Prada and Jil Sander, both labels by designers of intellectual agility,
    technical know-how and aesthetic quirkiness. Raf Simons at Sander
    recently narrowed his already-slim silhouette to the point where his
    models look like calligraphic brush strokes.




    His palette this season was cool and maritime: the pale greens of
    dunes covered in beach grass, the flat blank blue of a Low Country sky.
    Somehow, though, while declining to flout the visual vocabulary created
    by the label?s founding designer ? often mischaracterized as minimalism
    ? Mr. Simons has managed to articulate a visual idiom of his own. It is
    terse, direct and, as probably befits the son of a professional
    soldier, disciplined.




    No sentimentalist, Miuccia Prada nevertheless remains a romantic,
    her work driven by her highly singular notion of social engagement in
    all kinds of media (art, architecture, music, clothes). It may seem
    like a far-fetched assertion to make about a designer who turns out a
    collection built around boiler suits, mad scientist lab coats, pajama
    sets in muted floral patterns, and skinny shirts over skinnier trousers
    in patterns that collide nearsighted geeks, but Ms. Prada has once
    again come up with her own alternative to the scrawny, unconvincing bad
    boys that have dominated men?s fashion since Hedi Slimane first saw
    Pete Doherty play. It is not exactly that she makes emo fashion. But
    that?s the general idea.






























    Fashion is a form of ugliness so intolerable that we have to alter it every six months - Oscar Wilde

    StyleZeitgeist Magazine
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