Styles for tightening fashionable belts at Milan Fashion Week
What to wear with a recession looming? Milan Fashion Week may well have some answers.
Marquee names on the calendar, including Fendi, Prada and Max Mara, all offered a rumination on what women might want when belts are tightened and yet lives remain busier and more multifaceted than ever.
Mostly this has centred on practical, versatile pieces that can be pulled out year after year and still loved enormously. Things such as the trench coats (albeit ones lined with sequins) and roomy bags at Fendi, classic tailoring, always with a twist, at Prada, and the seemingly endless ways that Max Mara creative director Ian Griffiths can re-imagine the luxury Italian house’s famous camel cashmere fit this narrative.
Much has been made of a recent pendulum swing from the hedonistic “roaring 20s” post-Covid lockdowns where Y2K fashion and high voltage “dopamine” dressing reigned. There’s been discourse on social media platform TikTok about “recessioncore”, including theories on celebrities not wearing necklaces on the red carpet and why pared-back, muted tone styles are making a return.
This reflects a similar story post the 2008 recession, when early aughts excesses and logomania were tamed with clean-lined minimalism.
Meanwhile the so-called hemline index, first coined by economist George Taylor in 1926 to posit that when times are good, hemlines creep up, and drop when times, and stocks, are low, seems to be in play. So far, yes, there’s been plenty of midi and maxi-length skirts this season.
All three brands took elements of functional and purposeful menswear — the tailoring, the overcoats, good crew neck knits — to Milan Fashion Week and re-imagined them from a female perspective. The effect being: smart clothes, little fuss but enough interesting details, from sea-green teddy coats at Max Mara, gauzy origami fabric flower details at Prada, and the lingerie and skirt over trouser silhouettes at Fendi, to create intrigue.
Particularly interesting is how Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, who, in their creative collaboration at Prada, orchestrated their collection around modes of dress. This season, the duo took elements from the regulation garms worn by nurses, the military and more, and entwined them with the most special clothes of them all — wedding dresses.
As stated in the show notes of the collection, the duo wanted to examine the purpose of clothes. “Uniforms are sartorial representations of care and responsibility, transformed utilising the aesthetic language of eveningwear. Wedding dresses, symbols of love, become everyday attire, their skirts proposed with sweaters as a new form of quotidian dress. This exchange, between the notion of the everyday and occasion wear, the familiar and the exceptional, gives a different importance to both.”
In a world made topsy turvy, the idea of valuing the everyday and the most precious makes sense — so, too, clothes that you can get about your day in.
Milan Fashion Week continues this weekend before the fashion month circus arrives in Paris next week.