So Long Quiet Luxury

MILAN — The men’s fashion week that closed in Milan on Monday was perilously short: barely a long-weekend. JW Anderson skipped the season; Gucci and Fendi opted to forgo men’s for co-ed shows in February; and some smaller labels steered clear of the catwalk altogether.

If things carry on this way, some kind of merging of the Pitti Uomo trade fair in Florence and Milan men’s fashion week could make sense. Of course, it’s not the number of shows that is the real problem, however: two days filled with fresh ideas would suffice.

But fashion, today, is ruled by merchandisers, and it shows. Where once these key figures helped creative directors bring ideas to the selling floor, broadening their appeal without sacrificing their integrity, merchandisers have taken total control of the design rooms, and the result is that everything looks the same, because conventional wisdom dictates that daring is out of the question and products that sell require iteration not re-invention.

And yet offering clients the latest iteration of what they already have may be the best way to deepen the downturn in demand that’s weighing heavily on the luxury fashion industry.

In Milan, many brands embraced either the wilderness or posh partying. This was a season of everything hairy and more (sheepskin, not fur) and shimmer and shine (metallics and lurex are having a moment, in and out of the club). It was also a season of tailored formality for after dark: tuxedos and roundabouts, and jewels too, as seen at Dolce & Gabbana amidst a keen and catchy cherry picking, reshuffling and updating of the duo’s best menswear moments from the mid-90s to the early-00s. When times get tough, stick to your guns — that’s wise.

So long quiet luxury. Overall, the fashion proposal was pretty safe, but a new and interesting male protagonist emerged: an exuberant guy who knows how to handle excess with measure; the bearer of a bold personality, in shades of ego ranging from charming to perilous.

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At Emporio Armani, he was a seducer, in a collection that — with its mix of bold tailoring, affirmative shapes, dense masculine shades of tobacco, rust and grey and lots of metallics — was one of the best of the week, bringing fresh attention to King Giorgio’s diffusion line. It was a testament to the magic of the Armani style, and the skills of those who surround Mr Armani himself — in this case, design director Nicola Lamorgese — and translate his point of view into something fit for today. The collection’s subtle way with exuberance was wonderful, and the Emporio man came across as soft in his sultry sophistication.

Over at Pierre-Louis Mascia, seduction took a bookish, decadent turn, in a proliferation of prints swarming all over coats, robes, shirts and t-shirts that were deliciously executed, but a bit en retard in terms of style. Mascia has a beautiful hand with print, but the aesthetic he fosters in the fashion show — this was his second, and his first in Milan after last season’s debut at Pitti — is way too redolent of vintage Etro, and at times of the work of both Alessandro Michele and Antonio Marras. And yet he has a way with lightness that is all his own, which would probably be a good direction to explore further in search of a more personal tone.

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Wild boys were all over Milan, but nowhere they were wilder — in a William Burroughs sort of way — than at Prada, where co-creative directors Miucca Prada and Raf Simons explored the raw energy of instinct as the fuel of the creative act: the act of getting dressed, that is.

The collection was another iteration of a solid Prada trope: the clash of different, even disparate, elements into an idea of style as collage. It was the tone of the expression that, this time, was different, however: a bit dirty, clearly more dangerous. They were the cowboy boots in wacky colors and faded floral prints that set the tone, and the way they stretched the hem of stovepipe trousers. To this writer, they were redolent of the kind of raw masculinity Martin Margiela himself fostered, as well as Helmut Lang, back in the late Nineties heyday.

Truth be told, the amount of both shaggy sheepskin and duvets, but also the five pockets jeans, gave off a Dsquared2-ish vibe, with a trademark, angular Prada twist. This was a collection that felt a bit forced, but it was also a step forward in a new direction for the Prada man: less cerebral, more sensual, still a post-teenager of sorts.

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Character-building has always been Luca Magliano’s forte. The Magliano label is still relatively young, but it keeps evolving and maturing, avoiding becoming formulaic. The debt to 1980s Comme des Garçons and Yohji Yamamoto is still there, but it is paid in a sensitive way. The rebellious spirit of the label’s early days has not waned; instead it’s been kneaded into the very structure of the garments, suggesting attitudes through cut and materials. This season, looking at the individuals of all ages and body types that walked the catwalk in pitch dark, Lemaire’s poetic realism came to mind, but it was distorted through a gritty and melancholic lens. Playing with ideas of nudity and intimacy, and with the atmosphere of a walk on the seafront, at night, in winter, the collection oozed a lived-in harshness that felt captivating.

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The lighter calendar brought much needed attention to a bunch of valid new, or relatively new, names. Luca Marchetto and Jordan Bowen, aka Jordanluca, are some of the most interesting voices to have emerged at Milan fashion week in recent years, although the label is London-based. Their language is sharp and angular, redolent of punk meant as a subversion of certain British clichés; their tone of voice, however, is energetic rather than vitriolic. This time, they added an abrasive coating of romanticism, with the show culminating in the celebration of the real marriage between the two designers, complete with officiant, relatives and friends. Sensational it surely was, but it didn’t feel fake or fabricated: rather, a simple yet effective idea delivering a message of universal empathy.

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Ludovico Bruno’s Mordecai project continues to evolve. Based on an idea of wandering techno nomadism suspended between folk abstraction and rarefied athleticism, the collection is as poetic as it is functional. There are echoes of Hed Mayner, as well as early Yeezy, but Bruno’s hand is elegant and personal, and the presentation in the form of a Rite of Spring felt emotional.

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Federico Cina is another talent worth watching, with a distinctive voice that merges minimalism and melancholia. Dedicated to his recently deceased grandparents, this season’s collection was particularly pure and yet replete with sentiment and dignity, with the presentation in the form of performative scenes, art directed by Gabriele Rosati, amplifying the emotional intensity.

The world of Simone Botte and Filippo Biraghi, aka Simon Cracker, is unruly by definition, much in a House of Beauty & Culture kind of way: upcycling carried on in a DIY punk kind of way. And yet, the duo is not stuck; the aesthetic is deliberately dirty, but it keeps moving forward. The humorous attack on tropes of high-class dressing, this season, felt on point, with a Franco Moschino aftertaste.

Pronounce’s Yushan Li and Jun Zhou, meanwhile, once again chose Milan over Shanghai to present their vision of gender bending tailoring with a distinct East-meets-West flavour, and scored with their playful sculptural shapes.

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Elsewhere, those who were stubborn in being themselves scored. At Dunhill, Simon Holloway keeps delivering dapper hyper-formality with conviction and bravado. Anything but anachronistic, hisway with posh dressing is the acknowledgement of a modern customer whom fashion has recently ignored — kudos for that.

At Brioni, the Roman exuberance that’s part of the brand’s DNA keeps echoing in the gentle timbre of Norbert Stumpfl, the artistic director who’s taking strides and creating attention around a house that has been relatively dormant. In his hands, even the jacket woven with spun gold — the same manufacturing used by the Vatican — looked pictorial and graceful rather than flamboyant, not to mention a rather splendid sense of colour and easy shape.

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Ease is part of the Giorgio Armani code since day zero: a principle that’s ever relevant and that the brand keeps updating season after season. With the steady help of both Leo and Gianluca Dall’Orco, Mr Armani delivered another knockout that was all about softness and gently breaking the rules. The elongation and the sporty volumes were the peak.

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Alessandro Sartori’s Zegna man shoved his hands into the low pockets of sack jackets and large coats that seem inherited from the family heirlooms, or high-waisted trousers with deep pleats, into which he tucked v-neck sweaters and shirts worn in pairs, neatly one on top of the other. The artistic director spoke of his research into noble materials and of an exploration of “posture, ways of wearing and using to promote an idea of Italian elegance with a Turinese stamp.” The result was a collection of ineffable, deconstructed classicism, quiet in tone but decisive in manner: proof that the classics,if seen with free and inventive eyes, can rank amongst the most contemporary expressions of men’s fashion.