Brands bring their A-game to Milan’s menswear shows

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In the seminal BBC sitcom Red Dwarf, there was a virtual-reality game titled “Better Than Life” which, as the name suggests, augmented a player’s reality with marked improvements drawn from his or her subconscious. It proved fatally addictive.

The Autumn/Winter 2022 Milan menswear collections reminded me of it — not just because of the NFT fad gripping fashion (one was offered for download at young brand Jordanluca, and more at Philipp Plein), nor Fendi’s “cryptocurrency wallets” (little keyring-y doodads containing devices by the cryptocurrency specialist Ledger). But because many menswear brands marked this much-vaunted return to physical shows — 16 live shows, far more than the three staged back in June, if well down from the usual 40 or so — with something a bit special.

Dean and Dan Caten of Dsquared2 inverted the usual narrative of the fashion show, popping out before the models to thank everyone for attending. Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana enlisted the musician Machine Gun Kelly to play live and walk down their catwalk. Prada went a fair few better, inviting 10 big-league Hollywood actors including Kyle MacLachlan and well-documented Prada fanatic Jeff Goldblum to model the first menswear collection by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons to be unveiled before a live audience. In short, brands brought their A-game.

Dolce & Gabbana’s collection was a tribute to music and the metaverse . . .  © Monica Feudi

 . . . and included plenty of oversized tailoring, exaggerated shoulders and logos © Monica Feudi

Those physical audiences, however, were still small — Fendi showed to 130 people instead of 1,300; Prada to around 300. Attendees remained distanced and masked, and although press and buyers travelled from the US and Europe, guests from Asia were absent.

Covid-19 made its presence felt in more ways than reduced capacities and masked faces. MSGM creative director Massimo Giorgetti said that he caught Covid over Christmas, as did many of his team and — most problematically — factory workers actually producing the clothes. Jonathan Anderson nixed his show only last week: in a sign of the febrile adaptability of smaller, younger brands, he filmed a virtual show on Friday at Scala nightclub in London and showed it digitally on Sunday night. He still plans a physical show for his other gig, Loewe, in Paris on January 22.

Jonathan Anderson filmed his show at London’s Scala nightclub . . .

 . . . presenting a collection of raving clothes partially inspired by a documentary on Cristiano Ronaldo

Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons referenced workwear and pragmatic clothing . . .  © Monica Feudi

. . . while enlisting Hollywood stars including Jeff Goldblum to celebrate their first menswear show with a live audience © Monica Feudi

Confusing times make for confusing messages. It was difficult to eke out an overarching direction from that small clutch of shows. Oversized tailoring seemed to be one: emphatically shoulder-padded and forceful at Prada, relaxed yet exaggerated at Zegna, David Byrne-levels at Dolce & Gabbana. That was perhaps the one message that could be pulled from a show that seemed to thrash for direction: “DG” logos graffiti-tagged across garments as if asserting ownership, rather than authorship.

Maybe those massive, swaggering shoulders are a confidence trick: when uncertainty reigns, why not draw on a universally recognised symbol of assertiveness and power to convince everyone it’s all OK?

Those were feelings that many wanted to project. “There’s a strength when you feel good in your clothes,” said Silvia Venturini Fendi of the menswear collection bearing her family name. Miuccia Prada described the collection she and Raf Simons created as “clothes that make people feel important”.

Both Fendi and Prada chose to emphasise this through tailoring, albeit twisted. One twist at Fendi was jackets and trousers being chopped and interconnected to form long skirts or cape jackets — they didn’t work, but the rest did. There was an urgency and energy to this show, models zigzagging around a giant sloping Fendi logo. By and large, you could imagine these clothes walking on the streets, minus the weird skirts.

At Fendi, models sported layered coats, capes and jacket in traditional fabrics such as Vichy check tweed . . .  © aldocastoldi

. . . and carried accessories including Peekaboo FForty8 shopper bags and reinterpretations of the Baguette © aldocastoldi

At Zegna, Alessandro Sartori presented layered, functional clothes in soft shapes . . . 

. . . and a delicate palette of white, slate grey, aubergine, camel, mahogany brown and black

The same is true of Alessandro Sartori’s Zegna. Nothing feels forced or overworked. Just as a pre-IPO rebranding has lopped off the rather unwieldy “Ermenegildo” from the label, so Sartori has settled into his groove and is making markedly wearable, desirable clothes. “No strange tricks,” he said.

Although Sartori’s jackets and coats were wide-cut, they still felt gentle, and they and everything underneath were designed to mix and match in muted tonal hues — he calls it “modular” and says customers are buying into the idea. It’s kind of a new suit, soft and supple, and looks great. It was a pity not to see these clothes live on moving, breathing bodies — Covid concerns led the brand to switch to a film format shortly after Christmas — not because they seemed any lesser, but because it’s where you really feel they’re going to end up.

Oddly, the same was true of Jonathan Anderson’s messed-up, mashed-up, gleefully creative collection of euphoric raving clothes. Granted, one assumes it’s an entirely different customer that wears his Cristiano Ronaldo-inspired sequinned football strip than Zegna’s vicuña wool. Yet both seemed real.

Reality was the inspiration behind Prada — if we’re talking augmented reality, this is one augmented by hyper-luxe fabrications, exaggerated shapes and those movie stars. The idea, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons asserted, was to give importance to real-life, everyday dress, so functional overalls were executed in silks and high-shine leathers, bomber jackets trimmed in thick flanges of mohair faux-fur, sweaters knitted with structures in the shoulder to oomph out the silhouette.

It was, Simons said, about “blurring” the lines between tailoring and the street. “Through these clothes, we emphasise that everything a human being does is important,” asserted Prada. “Every aspect of reality can be elegant and dignified.”

It was a powerful message, a powerful show, a hardcore proposition. It felt important in fashion terms — these clothes will be ceaselessly photographed and will grab plenty of attention for Prada. Which is the point of a catwalk, after all. But it was easy to see the reality: those movie stars are hardly the teenage ectomorphs that populate most fashion shows, and they looked great. And even if we’re WFH-ing in the metaverse for the foreseeable, you’ll always need a great coat.

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