ETRO FALL 2015 MENSWEAR

ETRO F / W 2015

MENSWEAR 2015 RTW

Milan men's fashion week is an exotic bazaar of disparate international tribes united by their appetite for fine, fast-selling gentlemen's apparel. So details can be lost in translation—such as when Kean Etro set out to explain a little about the thinking behind this Etro collection.

A blissed-out, philosophical soul, Etro decided to lead in with the rhino illustration on his invitation. He said: "That rhino is a symbol of the rhino that came to Europe in the early 1500s, was painted, and became a sensation." 

"The one Albrecht Dürer drew?" a reporter asked. "Yes…giraffes too were important," Etro gamely replied.

Linguistic dissonance be damned: This was a collection that needed no translation and was the strongest Etro has shown for a while. 

Tautly constrained to a palette of browns and khaki touched by purple, yellow, and red, Etro used his family estate of rich but easily overwhelming pattern with the lightest possible hand.

There was just the faintest suggestion of paisley shadowing the worn horizontal corduroy outerwear, and the swirls in the evening suits at the end were obscured and enticing rather than amplified and alarming. 

Great on the flesh were a series of wool-tweed track pants that combined mature material and youthful silhouettes—see looks 29, 30, 34, and 35. 

Perhaps the rich, red ponyskin ensemble—"remember, it is a cow, not pony," Etro cautioned—was a tad de trop, but this was a deft and interesting menagerie of clothes that pulsed with soul.

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