At the seasonal shows taking place in New York, London, Milan and Paris, there’s been a lot of chatter on the front row about the snowballing scale of fashion shows. The crowds of screaming fans outside them probably couldn’t care less about what’s coming down the catwalk, which in far too many cases feels gimmicky: clickbait clothes that are desperate to go viral. Designers are feeling it, too. Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons have been going on about reduction and simplicity, celebrating everyday uniforms in their most recent collections. Matthieu Blazy has been using the phrase ‘perverse banality’ to describe his unassuming, casual archetypes in trompe l’oeil leather. Jonathan Anderson has been dialling back his Loewe shows to essentials. And of course, soon we will see the return of Phoebe Philo, the woman who reshaped the look of fashion in the midst of the last double-dip recession and influenced a generation with her clean, logoless aesthetic.
It might sound silly to say that designers are making clothes again — instead, it feels like they’re focusing on simple, intelligent and precision-cut clothes. It feels prescient, too; in the real world, a socioeconomic storm is brewing, inflation is at an all-time high and fashion is gearing up for tough times.
It all comes back to one word that has been absent in fashion parlance for quite some time: Minimalism. Remember her? While most young’uns might be too young to remember the clean, architectural lines of Jil Sander and Calvin Klein, the idea of clean-lined silhouettes and hyper-focused clothes, antidotes to the logomania and bling-bling ostentation of the last few years, has been gathering momentum. This morning, in a vast, futuristic space in central Milan, Ferragamo’s 27-year-old creative director Maximilian Davis cemented the return of the M-word with his sophomore collection for the house. As far as fashion shows go, it offered purity and elegance, and a lot of classics. It also proved that less really is more when it comes to wanting to look very expensive.
Anok Yai was the first to emerge through the circular space, which felt like a spaceship with beautiful carpets, wearing a navy cashmere cocoon coat, a back scooped to perfection. It was just one of the many looks that went down the route of treasure-forever timelessness. What followed was a palate-cleansing collection of sharpened classics. Think navys, greys, charcoals in double-faced cashmere, nappa leather, brushed suede and shearling. One of the interesting things about Maximilian’s approach is that he is one of the few creative directors of his age group at a house, and yet whereas designers twice his age misjudge what his generation wants (bright colours, logos, Y2K), he is the perfect example of what so many young people actually want: great quality, unfussy clothes, that make you feel sexy and expensive. In his hands, a top-handled lady bag, or a high-necked double-breasted suit, can feel cool and erotic, in the way that Helmut Lang and Tom Ford made them feel in the 90s. Context is everything — you get the sense that Maximilian’s Ferragamo girls and boys might be wearing these grown-up clothes to the club.
Where the show got really interesting was when it began to draw on Max’s inspiration of Old Hollywood in its golden era of the 50s, via sci-fi futurism and high-tech sportswear. A puffball skirt came in optic white nylon, and that recurring cocoon cut taken from old-school couture was applied to a cropped technical bomber and shirting. A couple of high-shine leather looks, a low-cut hourglass dress and cargo suits, brought wipe-clean sex appeal. The Ferragamo red that the brand went big on last season – so much so that it covered the entire show in the colour, originally taken from the pair of sparkly Dorothy pumps Salvatore made for Marilyn Monroe – was used far more sparingly this season, appearing in only a handful of looks: a scarlet trouser suit, a few coats, bodysuits and bags. Where it really popped was on the Fontana-like slashes on zip-up vents on leather jackets, a black trench, and on the winged sleeves of a slinky LBD. Look closely and you’ll see it in the darting of tailoring elsewhere, or the piping of a carefully-sculpted tracksuit.
That’s the thing about minimalism. It doesn’t need to be boring; the interesting bits are all in the details, which probably wouldn’t be picked up by a phone camera. This was a seriously sharp, seriously chic collection. Maximilian is hitting his stride at Ferragamo, already one of the key players in Italian fashion. And he did it without a single gimmick in sight.
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Images via Spotlight