MODELOS: MENSWEAR FALL 2015

domingo, 29 de marzo de 2015

There are images that are forever lodged in the collective subconscious, and periodically come back to haunt or inspire. Gaia Trussardi kept thinking of a Kurt Cobain portrait shot by photographer Jesse Frohman as she started designing the Trussardi collection.

It’s an iconic shot: Cobain, in his signature haphazard layers and aviator cap, looks at the camera through oversized white-frame sunglasses, at once sarcastic and melancholic.

"Kurt Cobain was so elegant in his utter fragility: That's what inspired me," said Trussardi today, adding that she wanted to create a luxurious version of grunge.

The notion of taking what's rough and raw, even poor, and turning it into something precious is hardly surprising. It has happened many times in fashion. You know the method: Take the shape, cut it into an expensive fabric, and give the privileged a frisson of how the outcasts dress, without compromising on luxe.

That said, Trussardi never pretended to reinvent the wheel. She used the oversized volumes and multiple layers of grunge to twist and turn the house's staples. Leather was featured in abundance, in the form of superbly supple deerskin for voluminous parkas and jean blousons worn on top of bouclé cardigans and cargo pants—again in leather—or five-pocket jeans that were actually made of cashmere. Cobain's ripped tees turned into gauzy cashmere underpinnings in the process.

That's all we got: glorified basics in expensive textures. The idea worked, and the pieces indeed came out well. What was lacking, however, was the desire factor, the magic that turns a piece of clothing into an object customers cannot live without.

A little more daring in the future could help. The Trussardi man, after all, is an adventurer. He deserves some guts. Gaia Trussardi has them, so it's time to bring them out.

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.