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]
Looking Like a Billion Bucks
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.