The 7 Best Collections From Milan Fashion Week
Milan Fashion Week started with a retrospective. “Italiana, Italy Through the Lens of Fashion 1971–2001” showcases the formative years of the country’s ready-to-wear industry and the great names that built it. The luncheon celebrating its opening was a nostalgia-inducing affair for all in attendance, but by week’s end, it seems right to say that Italian fashion’s glory days are not necessarily all behind us. Renaissance might be too grand a word for the current state of things, but we are certainly witnessing a flowering of fresh new Italian labels. Women and men of taste have launched lines with niche appeal (Attico, LaDoubleJ, For Restless Sleepers), or, in the case of Marco Zanini, are helping to reinvigorate established companies like Santoni and Aspesi. The city’s big names had a good week, too, demonstrating not just Milan’s famous commercial savvy (a point made explicit by the Italiana exhibition), but also a commitment to ideas.
It started with Moncler, which slipped in front of Gucci to assume the season’s opening night spot. Remo Ruffini’s top-to-bottom rethink of the outerwear label has produced a forward-looking business concept, with monthly rollouts by well-chosen designers and, more important, highly desirable products both conceptual and commercial to get people shopping.
Gucci is the envy of the global industry for the way Alessandro Michele triggers our shopping impulses. His new collection will keep things moving along nicely in stores. Michele is so confident in his vision (a sentiment clearly reciprocated by his bosses), he went high concept, transforming the company’s lately opened hub space into an eerie operating room. The show’s fake baby dragon and severed heads, created with Cinecittà’s special effects house Makinarium, were the most talked about—and memed about—sightings of the week. Marketing is part of Michele’s genius. His real achievement, though, was getting the nerds among us to read Donna Haraway’s prophetic 1984 essay, “A Cyborg Manifesto.” Talk about a head trip.
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