Ciao amori! Feeling the full effects of Blue Monday? Well, fear not, the new year brings plenty of brand spanking new FASHION! Dry Jan, this is not. Kicking off the rollercoaster of shows is Milan Fashion Week Men’s, which sees the stable of established single-moniker fashion houses — Prada, Fendi, Gucci et al. — joined by British imports, such as JW Anderson and Charles Jeffrey LOVERBOY. Besides all the beautiful tailoring and boys-in-skirts, this season marks a few new debuts, too. Well, kind of. Gucci is still in its interregnum, showcasing a studio-designed collection until a new creative director will be announced later in the year, and we have new designers (welcome home, Marco de Vincenzo at Etro) joining your Milanese faves. Here’s everything you need to know about what went down at Milan Fashion Week.
Giorgio Armani
Inspiration for Giorgio Armani’s namesake show came from “Milan’s atriums found in noble palazzos … Atriums that hide gardens, spaces designed with discreet geometry in white and coloured marble,” according to the show notes. Hidden and discreet, there was a sense of sybaritic luxury in the collection, which started with relaxed grey bouclé suits and evolved into surprisingly exotic animal-print faux fur coats, ultra-soft layers of cashmere, alpaca and velvet tailoring in the Italian maestro’s signature shades of greige and navy. This was Mr Armani doing what he does best, and what he knows firsthand: clothes for living la dolce vita in the most luxurious surroundings. Perhaps a sojourn to the Alps also inspired a brief interlude of scarlet-accented skiwear — because if you live in a Milanese palazzo, that’s probably how you’re spending your winter weekends. And as for evenings, well you might have a night out at the opera, for which there was plenty of midnight-black velvet tailoring accompanied by perhaps the greatest accessory of all: women in Armani eveningwear, clutching at the arms of the models who closed the show. Now that is aspirational. OA
JW Anderson
Exactly a decade ago, Jonathan Anderson landed himself on the pages of British tabloids following a particularly avant-garde menswear show in London. Men in miniskirts? Outrageous! The year may have been 2013, but there was little from the collective reaction to suggest that his ruffled skorts and bustier tops would soon become de rigueur on men’s catwalks around the world. For AW23, Jonathan revisited those very skorts, albeit in leather (2013 also marked the year he joined the Spanish leather house, Loewe). “When you start something, you, automatically as the designer, have to reject it,” he explained after the show. “I feel like I’ve gone through this phase with my own brand of rejection, rejection, rejection. I’ve never really gone back, but ultimately I felt like I had to go back to be able to go forward.”
You could call it rebirth. The show opened with even more skin on display than a decade ago, courtesy of puckish boys in wool budgie-smugglers carrying bolts of wool and a couple of models in nothing but leather boots and T-shirts with pillows sewn into them, clutched by arms painted with cartoonish pomodoro tomatoes. “We use cloth to build what we do,” Jonathan extemporised. “It’s this idea of it being the precursor of design, you need the fabric to be able to make the look and I liked this idea of it being something which is a raw state of mind.” You could say the collection was primitive, stripped back to archetypal garments often worn solo. Big fuzzy shearling jackets, elongated buckled duffle coats, and oversized sweaters were often worn with little else. There were quirky details, too, that continued the exploration of contemporary surrealism that has been capturing Jonathan’s attention in recent years. At the nape of many garments were big leather and plastic SIM cards, perhaps some kind of comment about how we’re all plugged into our smartphones.
Frog-faced slides and boots were the results of a collaboration with Wellipets, a recently relaunched but until now kids-only British brand that was once worn by Princes William and Harry — “in better times,” as Jonathan pointed out — as children. Jonathan has been wanting to collaborate with them for years, having worn them as a child himself, and the timing couldn’t be more prescient — frogs, it should be noted, have the amphibious ability to change gender. Plus, they’re fun! You get the sense that’s an increasingly important criterion at JW Anderson, and one that resonates with a meme-savvy audience (look out for the pigeon-shaped clutch on the second season of And Just Like That). “I feel like we’re going to head into a season of reduction and stripping back,” Jonathan reflected. Indeed, dark times are ahead for many, given the crashing global economy. “I feel like if we don’t have humour within us, it’s even harder. Plus, they’re really very nice!” OA
Charles Jeffrey LOVERBOY
There’s nothing that we fashion folk love more than a debut, and this season in Milan, the honour of the most hotly anticipated first-time show of the season went to London fave Charles Jeffrey. A notable graduation for the LOVERBOY brand, bringing its expansive, irreverent vision to a notoriously conservative fashion capital, curiosity around what Charles would bring to the stage was understandably piqued. The opening suite of looks established common ground between the Scottish designer and the staid fashion culture of the city he now shows in, centered on expertly cut, slate grey tailoring in a faded Prince of Wales check – a muted riff on the designer’s signature tartans, perhaps. While that may sound like a capitulation of sorts on the Charles’s part, these looks were not, of course, debrided of the quintessential LOVERBOY theatricality that has earned him his global legions of fans. Models faces were smudged with coal, and one even carried a lantern, as if they’d stomped straight to the runway from the mines.
This trademark eccentricity blossomed from there: grey denim trousers, coats and belt-fastened jackets were etched with witchy pentagrams; hulking polychrome Fair Isle knit jumpers featured the brand’s cute squiggled mascots, worn with teeny-tiny ruffled vinyl skirts. This then exploded into a rainbow parade of warped neon and scarlet grid-printed dresses, Colman’s-coloured suiting and swathes of electric lilac tartan, before fading out to a short procession of brilliant white dresses –from columnal halter silhouettes to bombastic crinolines – that proved the honed draping skills of LOVERBOY’s womenswear team. A debut that deserves a hearty congratulazioni, we say! MS
Prada
The invitation to Prada’s AW23 menswear show was a white pillow, accompanied by a cushion cover in what could be one of Prada’s archival ugly-chic prints. It seemed to suggest the idea of sleeping — or even dreaming. In actual fact, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’ latest show was an exploration of reality, aptly titled ‘Let’s Talk About Clothes’. The idea was to take the most recognisable sartorial archetypes and transform their meaning through language. Talking about clothes, however, belies the very point of them: they’re to be worn, after all; you can speak through them. And although this collection was framed as a dialogue, its strength was in its simplicity. The collection wasn’t a rambling monologue. In fact, if the looks were sentences, they’d be sparse, to-the-point statements, descriptive without using too many adjectives. Here more of our thoughts on the collection in our full review here. OA
Etro
Archives always loom in the backdrops of fashion shows, especially when a new creative director arrives — albeit only figuratively. At Etro’s menswear show, the first from its new designer Marco de Vincenzo, it was a more literal backdrop. The house’s massive textile warehouse in Como was transported and installed in its entirety into a vast industrial space in Milan to become the immersive show’s set, a reminder of just how many prints and fabric have been developed by the house since its inception in 1968. On the catwalk, however, the references were worn more lightly as Marco showed a strong menswear debut, which was imbued with just as much of his own personal history as Etro’s. Overall, it offered a softer side to menswear, and therefore masculinity: floral-embroidered leather jackets, childish teddy bear pyjamas, softly-rounded shoulders on unstructured coats, long flannel maxi skirts and plenty of wide-legged tailoring, big cosy knits, languid wide-leg trousers and neckerchief-tied blouson shirts. What set it all apart? It all came in a myriad of prints borrowed from the house’s archive, some of which were given new scale and subdued in colour. Respectful, personal and highly desirable — this show set the tone for Marco’s Etro. Watch this space. MS
Fendi
For her latest menswear collection, Silvia Venturini Fendi went heavy on the lightest of cashmere. The Fendi AW23 menswear show opened with a grey cashmere toga. Well, sort of. It was a zip-up chore jacket with a sheath of cashmere draped across it. The asymmetric silhouette quickly emerged as a motif, echoed by Donna Summer on the Giorgio Moroder-curated soundtrack, the disco ball lighting and a delightfully camp giant pinball set. She was clearly thinking about the nightlife of her youth (Studio 54, obvs) and those diaphanous asymmetric Halston dresses that she probably still has lying around in her wardrobe. The spirit of them was here — albeit in cashmere, and for men. Think ribbed-knit cold-shoulder tank tops, sari-draped sweaters with leather pants, sweaters slashed across the torso or gossamer-thin enough to see what lay beneath (nothing). There were more cashmere coats than you could count, boxy cashmere suits that came with asymmetric skirting over trousers, slouchy cashmere tracksuits, woven cashmere bucket bags stuffed with XXL fringed mohair blankets, fringed cashmere, skimpy cashmere, even cashmere hats! This was cashmere with jazz hands. Read our full review here. OA
Emporio Armani
Remember when air travel was glamorous? Well, you’re probably too young to remember the 1930s, but Emporio Armani was an ode to the first aviators. Mr Armani’s latest outing was staged around a set that mapped out Milan from a bird’s eye view, and the show was sort of like a sartorial red-eye flight — both in time and space. It opened with those vintage pilot must-haves: shearling flight jackets, faux fur-lined Prince of Wales jumpsuits, heavyweight boots and leather helmet hats. Plus, aviator sunglasses. Obviously. Layers of cashmere outerwear and relaxed tailoring — the kind you might want to wear as you settle into an airport lounge – gave way to an autumnal sunset of russety tones and textures, with the occasional jolt of magenta and ultraviolet. The journey landed with a reminder of what Mr Armani does so well: a sequence of night-sky eveningwear: formal black jackets with military frogging, satin-lapelled tuxedos neatly cinched at the waist by skinny belts, and a handful of sequinned waistcoats, jackets and trousers seemed to indicate cruising through a starry sky. A flight of fancy, indeed. MS
MSGM
In times as dreary as these, seeking solace probably doesn’t get you very far. Indeed, these are times in which we need to turn to the power of our dreams to transcend the bleakness of everyday life. At MSGM’s show, staged in the steel and concrete bowels of the Polytechnic University of Milan, that was exactly the message that shone through. Against the building’s Brutalist backdrop, Massimo Giorgetti presented a body of work that drew upon the 80s cult classic, Dead Poets Society. “Poetry, beauty, romance and love, these are what we stay alive for,” the creative director said, quoting John Keating, the film’s protagonist professor. “I like to think that this truth is confirmed every day by a generation that faces the World with the desire to change things. My work is inspired by them, including this collection,” he added.
His ode to this generation – burdened with the task of overcoming these tough times – made itself felt in the indulgently nostalgic repertoire of varsity tailoring, v-neck jumpers, deconstructed argyle check vests and Oxford shirts in midnight blues, umber-tinged reds and cool greys. Quarterback hoodies, baseball tops and university team emblems brought a sporty flair into the mix, while knits flecked with glinting sparkles introduced a heady romance. MS
DSquared2
Yes, we know you know that Y2K is back – and, arguably, has been back for so long that it’s on the cusp of fading away – but have you ever seen it quite like this? Indeed, while baby tees and dipped-down waistlines are par for the course in womenswear these days – a trend spearheaded by brands like fellow hometown hero Blumarine and emerging designers like Masha Popova – this season, DSquared2 went boldly where few, surprisingly, had thought to go before, translating the trash-glam look for men. Seemingly inspired by the motley crew you’d find at an all-American high school circa 2004, the Caten twins delivered a campy, rather more risqué riff on what you might have seen in the schoolyard – low-slung spaghetti strap tops with strass encrusted pink velvet caps and bootcut indigo jeans, pale star patches at the knees; trucker caps galore, shredded, trailer park denims and calfskin bowling bags; basketball jerseys with ‘EMO’ emblazoned on the front, and varsity jackets and itsy-bitsy Vanish-white shorts worn under roomy camel blazers. You get the vibe – clothes for teenage dirtbags who are all grown up. MS
1017 Alyx 9Sm
The barrage of polka-dotted, monogrammed bags – the fruits of the pairing up of an esteemed red-bobbed Japanese painter and the world’s largest luxury house – on our feeds over the past few weeks made us realise that, buzzy as they may be, brand on brand collaborations are starting to feel a little flat. In a time when collabs often feel as if they were the product of pairings drawn out of a hat, we’ve been craving creative partnerships with a little more depth to them – a quality that collaborations with world-building artists are invariably (well, almost) endowed with. Always one to have his finger on the pulse, this season, Matthew Williams enlisted art world jester Mark Flood as a co-designer for his latest collection for 1017 Alyx 9SM, which was presented at Spazio Maiocchi, the achingly cool Milanese gallery where Mark has just opened his most recent show.
Taking the now familiar 1017 Alyx 9SM aesthetic as their point of departure – jag-sharp, inky tailoring offset by roomier, streety hoodie-and-leather-pant ensembles, topped off with inquisitively designed footwear – the pair adapted some of Mark’s most iconic works into vivid prints on hoodies and wide-set raglan tees, and also created moody visual treatments for heavyweight denim and jersey pieces throughout. Pieces as disparate as cotton bandanas, halterneck column gowns, and slouchy leather trousers were aligned by way of punk-y spike-stud details, and major innovations were seen on the footwear – see: the exquisite chunky soled biker boots – and accessories front, with the debut of two new bag silhouettes. All in all, it was a collection that certainly warranted its gallery setting. MS
Gucci
Gucci is an interregnum. Since the news of its omniscient creative director Alessandro Michele’s departure in November, the house is in a phase of improvisation — not quite a blank slate, not quite an evolution of an aesthetic. A new designer will surely soon be appointed, but until then no frontrunner has emerged, as it did way back in 2015, when a slightly dishevelled Alessandro emerged to take a bow for a collection that softened the look of menswear with pussy bows, geeky tailoring and furry slippers. Yesterday’s show was instead ”an act of improvisation”, as the house described in its show notes; a “reflection of the individualities represented by the multifaceted creatives and craftsmen who inhabit the house of Gucci.” What does that look like? Read our full review of the collection here. OA