On the first day of Milan fashion week, Glenn Martens’ Diesel and Vivetta Ponti’s new project Venerdì Pomeriggio dealt with escapism and abandon in their own ways, reports Angelo Flaccavento.
MILAN — In our Digital Dark Ages, a resurgence of dizzy stoned escapism spiked with hedonistic abandon is perhaps to be expected. Milan Fashion Week opened to such a mood with Tuesday’s Diesel show, where the goings were overtly sexualised — that’s creative director Glenn Marten’s signature, after all — in a wasted, post-orgasmic, morning-after kind of way.
“It’s like when, after a night out, you wake up in a stranger’s bed in a hotel room you don’t even remember,” said Martens backstage, with his insouciant trademark grin. The collection came out on a set that gathered together almost fifty years of Diesel store displays, advertising campaign props and other poptastic paraphernalia from the history of the brand: the debris of “Successful Living.”
In terms of the clothes, it was another ode to wrongness, which is where Martens and Diesel so perfectly meet: lots of twisting and turning, paper dresses that peeled away and boiled wool separates that seemed to have melted on the body because of too much sweating. An unnecessary chapter of coated pastel jeans and blousons was giving Dario Vitale’s Versace, while the felted tailoring had energy.
It all made for an intoxicating vision, but the execution felt fabricated: a fashion version of what messy could be — at times rigid, at times carnival — missing genuine wildness.
Meanwhile, Vivetta Ponti’s idea of escapism and abandon is of the well-to-do variety. She unveiled her new project, Venerdì Pomeriggio (or Friday Afternoon) in a lush apartment on the tony Piazza Castello, and it was a pean to doll-dressing, fey velvet and the flat velvet shoes, called furlane, that Milanese ladies wear mostly at home. It was charming and surely fed the urges of this most romantic of designers. And yet there was something about her brand of wealthy escapism that felt too easy.
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