And thus began the season of the weird. After decades in which clothes that telegraphed sex or stealth wealth dominated the Milanese runways, it’s the stranger things that seem the most on target now.
“There’s a feeling that anything could happen, no matter how fantastical,” Matthieu Blazy wrote in his Bottega Veneta show notes, before seating his audience on low-slung leather bean bags in animal shapes — Jacob Elordi plopped down onto a bunny, Michelle Yeoh onto a lady bug. It turned a cavernous warehouse into a fun house and forced every guest to adopt an alternate perspective.
“Well, it’s kind of an irrational time,” Simone Bellotti said in something of an understatement backstage after his brilliant Bally show, inspired by the German Dadaist Hugo Ball.
Indeed, the most eye-catching appearance of the week was not, as it turned out, Mr. Elordi, or Jin of BTS taking a post-military service front row seat at Gucci, but Cheryl Hines, the actress-wife of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She showed up at Bally just after the news broke about her husband’s sexting relationship with a political reporter. (Apparently Ms. Hines is friends with the brand’s new owner, Michael Reinstein of the global private equity firm Regent.) And the best casting was not Cavalli’s supermodel reunion but Sunnei’s embrace of 70- and 80-something models in its 10th anniversary meditation on time. As opposed to that old fashion shibboleth, timelessness.
You can either retreat into the safety of the elegant chocolate suit (for that, go to MaxMara), the always-appropriate leather trench (at Tod’s, Matteo Tamburini did it best) or you can take the confounding, bizarro nature of this global moment and turn it into a look. The best shows in Milan did.
A Breakthrough and a Blast
Mr. Bellotti, for example, did it in his third Bally show, the rare Milan collection to really explore the allure of a new silhouette, one that both evoked the looming fear of the unknown and offered a carapace to match.
Inspired by a sloping iron cape he found in a photo of Mr. Ball in his Dada heyday, Mr. Bellotti raised necklines and sloped shoulders. Rounded blouson jackets mimicked mountainous boulders and skirts were shaped à la cowbell, so they curved out at the hips and in at the thigh. Some peplums were so aggressively structured, they jutted out like horns from floral frocks or from under neat jackets. Or like the metal spikes on the Mary Jane shoes beneath, which referenced both Alpine climbers and punks and were based on a shoe Bally first made in 1945, in the shadow of World War II. Coincidence? Nah. More like a uniquely trenchant remix.
Just as Mr. Blazy’s through-the-looking-glass games at Bottega Veneta, in a show that evoked childhood’s reality distortion field, offered an unexpectedly uplifting outlet. Imagine pleated or pinstripe pantaskirts. (Wait — pantaskirts? What even is that? I’ll tell you: wrap or asymmetric skirts with one pant leg emerging from beneath.) As if someone got stuck in the midst of trying on two different pieces and decided to just go with both. The style offers one way to put your foot in it, anyway.
With them came jackets so oversize they looked as if they had been filched from a parent’s closet, and more skirts with swishing tassels at the knee. Shimmering metallic evening slip dresses under porcupine quill headdresses that resembled both sea anemones and squishy toys, like an incredibly glamorous dunce’s cap or the most cathartic party hat (or a supersize D.I.Y. Rod Stewart wig).
It’s the extremes that now stand out: clothes that dare go there, wherever there happens to be. Maybe the living rooms captured by Greg Girard’s photographs and superimposed on sheaths and patent leather at Jil Sander, where Luke and Lucie Meier took power tailoring to an entirely different place, literally. Or the parachute suede coats and silks at Ferragamo, where Maximilian Davis transformed the whole idea of leaping into the void. The trapeze shirting and soignée culottes at Sunnei, where Loris Messina and Simone Rizzo dared to imagine a future that wasn’t sci-fi, but rather sophisticated utilitarianism.
And the shredded denim at Diesel, where the designer Glenn Martens continues to work his brand of fashion alchemy, transforming the most basic of fabrics into a vehicle of apocalyptic elegance with mind-blowing technique.
This time he did it by tufting dark denim into feathers at the collar of a jacket, lasering the faded blue of a cloudy sky into fringe and fantastical textures, and then filling the entire floor of his show space with an ocean of denim scraps, sculpted into undulating waves of detritus.
Recycling has never looked so unequivocally good.
The Scent of the Past
Certainly it was more interesting than the recycling of ideas going on at the biggest brands — Gucci, Moschino, Versace — all of whom seem to be in self-referential mode, turning inward and backward rather than outward.
That’s how it looked at Moschino, anyway, where Adrian Appiolaza in his second collection continued his tour of Moschino-isms past (pearls, slogans, bedsheets, bleach-bottle bags) with the aid of two collaborators — Terry Jones, formerly of i-D magazine, and the estate of the jewelry designer Judy Blame — but without the crucial undercurrent of social commentary that made the brand’s original double-entendres-in-a-garment so resonant.
And how it seemed at Gucci, where Sabato De Sarno took as his muse Jackie Onassis. In her head-scarves-and-big-glasses Capri years. Maybe every designer has to channel her at least once.
Cue similar head scarves and big glasses, plus car coats and minidresses woven from a neat floral-embossed raffia material for a bit of structure, as well as lots of bamboo accessories — bag handles, jewelry — that popped up in Mr. De Sarno’s nod to the Tom Ford Gucci era, in the form of gold hardware on slinky jersey dresses.
A more original way forward was offered by the ultra-miniskirts with tiny crinolines built into the elastic waistband so they popped out just a bit over the hip, worn with ribbed undershirts and matching big bucket hats, and the evening trench coats so long they dragged on the floor like trains.
There’s comfort in the known, sure, but stasis also. It’s hard to take risks when you have so much (revenue) to lose, but at the same time, not taking risks is pretty much a guaranteed shrug.
The tension was summed up perfectly, if probably unintentionally, at the Versace show, where Donatella Versace was inspired by one of her own Versus collections from 1997, back when she was running that line. A time, she recalled in a preview, that was full of “optimism” and “joy.” (You might think of it differently, but such is memory.)
So she brought it back, reviving the floral prints and squiggly graphics of that post-grunge collection in shades of tan, butter yellow and baby blue, and then mixing and matching it all in cropped tops, low-slung skirts and frayed jeans cut to show the tops of sheer pantyhose. The same prints and colors popped up on chain mail, some of which had been 3-D printed. Because even nostalgia needs a semi-update.
The clothes, remakes of a fashion remake of an actual cultural phenomenon, were all balanced atop shoes that were themselves balanced on heels made to mimic perfume bottles. Was there ever a better metaphor for the state of fashion itself? Time to step into the surreal.
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