Fashion Photography – The fall shows here, now that they’re over, were a lot like an alcohol-free version of “The Lost Weekend,” the 1945 Ray Milland film. What would that be like? An eternity of bad clothes crammed into four days with editors raging like shut-ins about the lack of fun (“Help, I need a drink!”) and the blogger Bryanboy announcing on Twitter that he had scored a free fur jacket from Dolce & Gabbana.
On top of that, when the relatively new designers at Ferré and Valentino — that would be Tommaso Aquilano and Roberto Rimondi at Ferré and Maria Grazia Chiuri and Pier Paolo Piccioli at Valentino — arrived at an Italian Vogue party on Friday night, the waiting photographers shouted the perfect response to Milan’s bleary weekend: “Chi sono?” Who are you?
The paparazzi can’t be blamed for not recognizing four talents that the fashion media outside Italy don’t know and, frankly, based on their early collections and 40-watt personalities, are not likely to know. Six years after Tom Ford bowed out at Gucci, a glass of Scotch in hand, Italian fashion hasn’t recovered its magic and energy yet.
And maybe it can’t. Maybe this is as good as it gets. A decent, satisfying head trip from Miuccia Prada every year or so; a reliable bit of quirkiness from Consuelo Castiglioni at Marni, where this season the shapes were particularly free-form and clashing; a good but not great collection from Gucci’s Fridi Giannini, who scraped off most of the hardware, switched from black to chic camel and ostrich feathers, and may have let a guy — Peter Dundas at Pucci — steal her lunch.
Although Italy continues to pump out beautiful leather goods and well-made clothes, like the dashing coats at MaxMara, which topped anything in Milan with their authority, it seems in many ways a country of reduced expectations. You hear a lot of people here, including designers, refer to “a TV culture,” as if the bright bimbo tackiness on the tube has leached into Italy’s creative soil. Read more »
