Milan Fashion Week: Shiny, happy people
Venturelli/Getty ImagesNew creative directors are shaking up the Italian powerhouses. Susie Lau reports on shows from Gucci, Prada and Versace – as well as Courtney Love singing on a conveyor belt.
There were a lot of things that felt new in Milan. It wasn’t necessarily the clothes – seismic shifts in physical garments are few and far between – but the mood, propelled by new creative directors, different venues and a shake-up to an industry that often rests on its laurels. Tradizionale may rule the roost in Milan but with new blood pumping into the design and creative teams at the Italian powerhouses, the Fashion Week feels that much more vibrant.
New beginnings
The changes at Gucci, one of the first shows of Milan Fashion Week, could be seen as we schlepped our way in the pouring rain to an abandoned train depot, a stark contrast from its long-time teatro venue in the centre of town. The serpent snaked its way on to the long and winding plush-carpeted catwalk, flanked by lush green gardens. The serpent in the garden would prove to be a potent metaphor for Alessandro Michele’s third ready-to-wear women’s collection for the house. As was a 17th-Century Carte de Tendre, charting emotional areas as opposed to geographical ones. The final destination on the map was love, which is what Michele is lavishing on this new-look Gucci. The sheer abundance of ideas and motifs in the collection was mind boggling. The kooky girl in the beret and the geek glasses was still there with her zany geometric prints and head-to-toe layers but there was a hint of sex, too, with sheer dresses and cheeky sequinned trompe l’oeil lines. Elsewhere, lavish Chinoiserie-inspired embroidery was everywhere, as was the blossoming of the classic double GG logo, painted over with florals.
At Jil Sander, Rodolfo Paglialunga is also finding his feet with a few seasons under his belt. The cut-out tailoring looked particularly strong as did the deconstructed silk shirt dresses. Models wore curved conical straw hats that added an allure to Paglialunga’s Jil Sander woman. She felt warmer somehow, and so did the clothes.
At Pucci and Roberto Cavalli, new creative directors Massimo Giorgetti and Peter Dundas respectively were making things younger, fresher and more contemporary. The former had zany under-the-sea prints and the latter, a bleached denim babe with leather dresses for the night. They were less assured beginnings but showed signs of things to come. Time is what’s needed to bed in these new designers.
Displaced formality
Miuccia Prada wasn’t present for Prada’s latest show, set in a yellow space with corrugated plastic suspended from the ceiling. Her aunt had passed away the night before and we were left to scratch our heads a little after the show as she normally throws out a thought-provoking bone for journalists to pick over. The components were all recognised Prada-isms – the oddball accessories (‘60s Twiggy-esque giant bauble earrings, hat nettings placed over the chest and silver flats), the abundance of skirts and a rich mix of deliberately ugly knitwear and geometric printed organza. But at the heart of it all was the tried-and-tested suit – which, apparently, has become Miuccia’s obsession. Here it came in different tweeds, in sheer fabrics, in striped patent and suede and with coats that came jingling with sequin pailette embroidery. These were formal codes displaced and messed up like the skittish soundtrack that jumped from Gloomy Sunday to Lydia Lunch. If you wanted a Prada 101, this show would be it.
At Moschino, Jeremy Scott was toying with the idea of dressed-up formality. His ‘ladies who lunch’ wore traffic-stopping neon and suits emblazoned with ‘Dangerous Couture Ahead’. The kitschy hazard road signs led to a finale where feathered frocks and gowns adorned with neon signage sashayed through a moving car wash. Scott turned the headline ‘Car crash couture’ into a positive thing. He does what he does with conviction and panache and in that sense, he stands apart from the rest.
Girl power
Antonio de Moraes Barros Filho/WireImage“Do I have a life, or am I just living?” “There will be people who say you can’t, but you will.” "Make your transition, make your transition.” These are some of the motivational lyrics intoned over a cover of house classic Underground Resistance’s Transition, re-recorded by Portuguese producer Violet and a handful of female artists for this year’s International Women’s Day. The theme of #IWD was ‘Make it Happen’ and that’s certainly what Donatella Versace did at her latest show, staged in a vast concrete stadium. Older supermodels like Raquel Zimmermann and Natasha Poly and newer figures like Gigi Hadid took to the runway in military-inspired garb, towering blocky platforms and camouflage frocks. Backstage, Donatella said she had wanted to be brave – coming from one of the most powerful women in fashion, the show left you uplifted.
In contrast, Phillipp Plein, known for his over-the-top extravaganzas, had a very different vision of empowering women. What to make of a bonkers sequence in which Courtney Love was sent down a moving conveyor belt, manned by robotic hands, singing Celebrity Skin? The irony was amplified when an assembly line of mannequin-esque models proceeded to move along the belt, with bags and accessories added on by the robot arms. “Oh, make me over... I’m all I want to be” – Love’s lyrics talked of the shallowness of Hollywood fame but in this context, they felt applicable to a fashion industry where surface at all cost is paramount. What lies beneath the fem-bots that Plein sent down his conveyor belt runway? With those glassy stares and Stepford Wife stillness, who could possibly know?