Milan Day Four: Cracking Fashion Codes

MILAN — How to work with established house codes or create your own were the main lines of inquiry of the fourth day of Milan Fashion Week.

Donatella has now been at the helm of Versace longer than founder Gianni Versace was before he was killed. And yet it is on her brother Gianni’s seminal oeuvre (in which Donatella played an integral part, truth be told) that the spirit and aesthetic of the brand still lingers, repeating motifs ad nauseam.

There was actually a moment, back in the early aughts, when Donatella went in a direction all her own. But for several years now, she has simply sampled iconic moments from Versace’s past. It’s a method that’s proven reasonably successful, especially with younger customers, but it risks feeling repetitive. Gianni’s back catalogue is expansive, not infinite.

That said, the collection the brand presented yesterday in a huge tram depot in Milan was one of its best in recent seasons, not least because it merged two iconic moments: the neo-baroque ballet costumes Gianni devised mainly for Maurice Béjart, turned into short and sculptural crinolines, and the neo-baroque home furnishing he created with Versace Home, which were translated (too literally, perhaps) into duvet jackets and duvet skirts that looked like draped blankets. There were also studded details, tons of black and replicas of the neo-medieval chainmail dresses Donatella herself made back in 1998. All in all, it was a lot to digest, but there was a graphic punch that kept things together.

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Adrian Appiolaza keeps morphing Moschino to his own whims, which incline towards the abstract, the conceptual and the Japanese, somehow forgetting about Franco, or using tricks and tropes from his archive as mere surface fodder. This was Appiolaza’s third collection for the house and the fruits of his work are becoming visible here and there. The fact is, Appiolaza approaches the collection almost like a merchandiser: the narrative is way too loose, and the references way too obvious. As a renowned collector of 1990s fashion, Appiolaza mines his own archive, and it shows.

Entitled “Tools of the Trade,” today’s outing was all about the process. Fine. Franco Moschino was probably there before Martin Margiela, but it’s to Martin, Rei and Yohji that Appiolaza mainly looked, splashing some Moschino slogans on top. At times it was lazy, but there were good pieces. Appiolaza’s references are for die-hard fashion fans; his work lacks the immediacy and openness that made Franco’s output so emotional: a joke on fashion, not just for insiders. It’s something Appiolaza should consider.

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Long-suffering Missoni has a heritage that’s at once easy and difficult to exploit. By focusing on materiality and playing with items that had an almost archival feel (founder Ottavio’s own wardrobe, that is), Alberto Caliri proved the right fit for the creative director position. The collection felt very Missoni — and yet it proposed a look (ultra layering on top, bare legs) that seemed a bit unresolved and untranslatable to real life. There is room for improvement, but this was a step forward.

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Over at Tod’s, Matteo Tamburini keeps taking forward strides in bringing a modernist spin to the classically Italian and proudly artisanal jewel in the crown of the Della Valle empire. This outing was quieter than last season’s stellar flowing foray into lightness, but looking at the pencil thin, impeccably sartorial silhouettes up close, one saw the designer’s interest in expressive surfaces. The goings were calm and understated, but there was tension underneath, and that was all for the better.

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Sunnei, the brainchild of Simone Rizzo and Loris Messina, is a very young house, which, in the vast but relatively homogeneous Milanese scene, has already carved out a niche for itself. The fashions Rizzo and Messina create are truly original (between the Memphis Group and Consuelo-era Marni) as are the presentations they stage. This season, the concept was fashion as transaction: a new boutique was unveiled at the end of the show, while the models carried shopping bags. A simple idea, but enough to make one think about the bottom line that sits below all the fashion blah blah that feeds the system. It was the perfect frame for sculptural pieces that felt particularly jolly, in a kindergarten kind of way.

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