Milan Fashion Week had moments of true glamour amid wardrobe essentials
Australian supermodel Gemma Ward opens show for the ‘Max Mara woman’.
You can always count on Milan Fashion Week to bring proper glamour. Really, you only need to check out the cult Instagram account, @sciuraglam, which charts the style of older Milanese women, to realise that glamour is an art form. It’s something reiterated in pop culture right now too with Truman Capote’s swans in the Feud: Truman versus the Swans series. Here there is a lesson in wearing elegance as armour.
Of sartorial armour there was much to be found on the runways at Milan Fashion Week. At Versace, always high on va va voom, there were military jackets and a chain-mail mini-dress with a top that resembled a breastplate.
The act of belting in a great coat is another well-known and long-trusted form of defence against life’s various trials and travails. Here Milan excelled.
At Max Mara, a label that is king of the cashmere coat, the signature camel was swapped for hues of navy and grey, and cut with a kimono-style sleeve.
Longtime creative Max Mara director Ian Griffiths took inspiration this year from famed French author Colette, a woman who lived life in defiance of conventions, for a collection that took in elements of sensuality with little slips inspired by 1920s lingerie, bodysuits and, as he put it, “a certain voluptuousness”. Australian supermodel Gemma Ward walked in the show.
“I’ve been obsessively reading Colette, not just for pleasure – but I was also writing the press release, and I wanted to get the right quotes and right pieces to check what I was saying was true,” Griffiths says.
“It was a bit like doing this collection was a little bit of a cross between designing a normal collection and doing an A-level in French literature, because I really wanted to be certain that I’d understood what Colette was about and I wasn’t making any mistakes about her style as a writer or her rationale as a writer.
“So, I was obsessively thinking about Colette’s writing, and thinking about Colette’s style of writing and how that relates to Max Mara’s style of design. Her spare and modernness, of using very few words, stripping away all the details – yet producing garments that kind of have emotional power.”
Having designed many collections for the brand he has worked for since 1987, Griffiths says the Max Mara woman contains multitudes.
“The Max Mara woman is a composite of so many women that I’ve met over the years, who have exhibited some kind of quality that I associate with Max Mara. I have this very clear idea of who she is, even though she’s not one particular woman. She’s little bits of thousands of women, all joined together,” he says.
“There isn’t a particular person that I think about in a particular season. When I’m inspired by Colette, I’m not thinking about dressing Colette, I’m thinking about that woman who wears Max Mara. If I was thinking about Colette, I’d be designing a costume in a drama for the BBC.”
The idea that women contain multitudes, and want to dress as such (and definitely not in costume), was expressed throughout Milan Fashion Week.
They want a smart coat and little slippy silky things. You can be a serious person while wearing tiny shorts.
Good separates with a little something exciting to them.
At Bottega Veneta, Matthieu Blazy continues to create clothes you could imagine a power gallerist wearing or a woman with a big job in finance who also takes pottery classes in her spare time. Or indeed, Kate Moss and Julianne Moore, both sitting front row.
There was his continued focus on texture with fringed leather maxi skirts and a spiky-hemmed red column, wool bouclé and cashmere and fil coupé dévoré on a long yellow dress. As Blazy said of his approach: “I wanted the technique to be in the fabric itself.”
The uber luxurious leather pieces the house is known for could be found in leather trench coats and red skirts paired with crisp shirts. Backstage, Blazy told reporters: “I thought it was better to go real”, but the thing about real for Bottega Veneta is that his version of reality is something rather more interesting.
For indeed right now, when phrases such as “quiet luxury” and the altogether more frightening “inflation are bandied about, clothes for every day that look, and perhaps even more importantly feel special seem more than ever what luxury fashion should be offering.
At Gucci Sabato di Sarno doubled down on his sleek, pulled-back vision for the mega-brand as it continues its resets after Alessandro Michele’s froths of fancy.
The shorts remained brief, the coats sharp and the sensuality of lingerie-inspired pieces added a certain element of softness to the angles. Elevating everyday pieces was to be found in sequin-edged outerwear with sculptural shoulders, and crystal-embellished collars – and the pea green featured throughout is the kind of hue that goes with nothing and therefore goes with everything.
Speaking of softness, a subversive kind could be found at Prada where Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons sent several iterations of shift dresses adorned with bows. Bows have been a big trend in recent months thanks to social media’s obsession with “coquette” fashion but you can count on Prada to put a twist on this.
Both Mrs Prada, as she is known colloquially in the business, and Simons were interested in remodelling shapes and silhouettes from the past too – those shift dresses, jackets with mid-century couture-like shapes but rendered in the house’s famous, and practical, nylon. “There is no way to think about the future unless you have a good understanding of the past,” said Simons.
Practicality, shot through with flashes of desire, was on the mind of Matteo Tamburini, who made his debut at Tod’s, following time at Bottega Veneta. As reported in The Wall Street Journal, he is intent on bringing “desirable objects” to the brand. This includes smart separates and a stylish foldable tote bag that could fit your laptop, and then some.
The Oscars are weeks away and it’s fun to play “guess which dress might make an appearance on the red carpet”. Certainly there will be Giorgio Armani; after all, Armani changed the game of red-carpet dressing.
He was a pioneer for building relationships with stars and dressing them in an altogether more elegant way. As Anna Wintour, American Vogue editor-in-chief and chief global content officer of Conde Nast, once said: “Armani gave movie stars a modern way to look.”
To close Milan Fashion Week Armani, who turns 90 this year and has no plans of retiring, once again proved longevity in fashion requires remaining true to your own vision. Amid the languid silky trousers and smart boxy evening jackets that are reworked each season, there were sophisticated strapless velvet gowns with rose embroidery and a lush green version with crystal edged bodice.
As Armani told reporters backstage: “I am me. The others are the others.”
Really, it’s a phrase all of us could do with remembering when dressing in the morning, no matter how we plan to face the day.
Fashion month continues in Paris this week with Dior, Saint Laurent, Rabanne and Hermes on the calendar.
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