Classy. Fendi SS24

September 21, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

At first, I thought that Kim Jones‘ Fendi collection for spring-summer 2024 is mediocre. But when Alexander Fury wrote that this is exactly what the Fendi woman should look like, I had a second glance at it. Jones isn’t reinventing the wheel at the brand, but he’s certainly building a contemporary and very coherent vision of the house and its client. Never fussy, rather understated, but not “just” minimal. Yesterday’s chapter was informed by Karl Lagerfeld’s spring 1999 show for the house and its powerful practicality drew from the Roman women – not least the Fendis and their closest professional cohorts – with whom Jones interacts when serving this brand. His collection was acutely and minutely designed to generate impact through detail, fit and finish. Mannish mohair tailoring (including skirts) was stripped of all visible closures and fittings, then cut with arms designed to be turned up, plus waistbands switched inside out, as if snaffled from a minimalist uomo’s wardrobe. Knitwear blouses, cardigans, skirts and dresses were architecturally entangled with each other against the body, creating striking new forms from conventional ingredients. Rib knits were expanded into a sort of jumbo-jumbo shearling corduroy, slightly flocked, used in a section of oversized work shirts, coats and split skirts. A paper-like, shiny-finish linen was used to fashion a cut-away dress in the same canary yellow that featured in that Lagerfeld collection 24 years ago. Nostalgic, but not daunting; rather, nostalgia that looks towards the future.

Collage by Edward Kanarecki.
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Butterfly. Blumarine Resort 2024

July 25, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

For resort 2024, Blumarine emerges from the armored chrysalis of the Joan D’Arc-themed autumn show and pops out as a butterfly in shining colors. Turquoise. Hot pink. Golden yellow. “The look isn’t as dirty as in the last few seasons,” Nicola Brognano elucidated. The designer said he wanted something more elevated and sensual, “a different energy, more joie de vivre, a more summer feel“. From the label’s archive he excavated a calmer color palette – nudes, pale pink, light blue, white – that he amplified into brighter vibrations. “There are no concepts, just sensations,” he said matter-of-factly. The look was ultrashort, body skimming and slinky, with viscose jersey providing a smooth, liquid surface malleable enough for wrapping, draping, and sash-knotting. Matching the barely-there minidresses’ colors, stretchy leggings that covered the needle heels of strappy sandals elongated the figure into a lean monochrome silhouette. Brognano unearthed a Blumarine lingerie look from years past, steering its once flirty, seductive attitude towards the overtly provocative. A tight-fitting bustier and leggings combo in stretch jersey with lace inserts was the season’s “new suit proposition.” Roses, another of Blumarine’s emblems, were also given the Brognano treatment. More thorny bush than manicured garden, they were laser-cut and appliquéd on a white minidress, or printed on a hot-pink mesh tube dress. The brand’s ubiquitous cargos came in a simplified evening version. In black canvas with a satin intarsia, they signaled a slight shift in the approach to Y2K that put Brognano’s Blumarine on the map in the first place. Asked how he feels about the in-your-face bare-midriff look that has ignited copycats by every high street brand, he was rather adamant. “Y2K? Honestly, I think it’s a bit passé.”

Men’s – Turning The Page. Giorgio Armani SS24

June 19, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Generally in 2023, and at the point of his career, Giorgio Armani is kind of punk. And appreciation his fashion – or rather, style – is punk, too. A blank page and a pencil: such has been the starting point of every Armani collection since 1975. Today, the Italian designer brought that moment of beginning to this collection’s moment of publication at his Milan showspace, via the pointed inclusion of an extremely large pencil at the end of his runway. Armani drafted his menswear masterpiece decades ago, but the cycle of fashion means that it is constantly subject to revisions, elisions, alterations, and edits; every season sees a new layer placed over the one before. The spring-summer 2024 one contained a direct reference to his very first menswear collection in the close up print of raffia weave used in roomy blousons, pants, and bags, but that archival gesture was not the point. “The collection surely recalls the past, without making it all about the past,” he said afterwards. The long, almost shirtlike cut of the light jackets had the same fluid elan of those famous pieces worn by Richard Gere so many years ago. And the four suits that closed this otherwise very holiday collection contained some silhouettes that any long-in-the-tooth Hollywood rep will fondly recall from his glory days. However you could just as easily conjure the image of this collection being worn by a new generation, in a new context, with stories of their own to tell.

Men’s – (Extra)Ordinary. JW Anderson SS24

June 19, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

Jonathan Anderson introduced the world of rugby to Milan Fashion Week yesterday when he took his bow wearing Ireland’s unreleased shirt, by Canterbury, for this September’s Rugby World Cup in France. “It’s because it’s father’s day today, so I thought I would,” said the designer. Willie Anderson, Jonathan’s dad, served as captain of Ireland’s Rugby Union team. That sweetly personal nod to the intimacy of our experienced domestic worlds ran through a collection that was rooted in Anderson’s own cultural experience but which also resonated more broadly. As ever at JW Anderson, the subject is approached in provocatively perception-altering ways. The set and backstage were decorated in the massively blown up blue and white stripes of Cornishware, a ceramic style once all the rage across the British Isles. This, said Anderson, signaled “conformity, things that are part of the household and become part of the psychology… things that are around you and become part of you subconsciously.” The ordinary becomes extra.

Rugby shirts, obviously central to Anderson’s own childhood experience, were bolstered with Bar jacket style hips and presented in knit or stiff jersey. Sweatshirts, fine knits, came with massively oversized v-notches that were then cut-out. In looks 44 and 48, these were knit in a nubbly weave inspired by the ’70s sofa in Anderson’s office. Schoolboy shorts (a theme seen earlier at Prada) boasted enough room for a spare leg at the left hip, thanks to a flying buttress of extra material at the side. Knit sweaters and dresses came with two bolsters, filled knit panels that snaked diagonally up the front of the torso like the homely spiraling baskets Anderson was inspired by. There were waxed knit shoes and waxed knit clothes in a mesh that vaguely resembled fruit bags and old-school collapsible shopping totes. Anderson estimated that around 70 per cent of the collection was knitwear. The wittiest of knits included tops fronted with what looked like balls of yarn – because they were. “Knitting has become such a craze and this is going back to the raw materials.”

Men’s – Skimpy, Gritty, Modern Sensuality. Prada SS24

June 18, 2023 | Design & Culture by Ed

(To experience the full version of this collage, check out my Instagram!)

It’s Prada day, meaning: a polarizing collection that makes everything else happening in Milan feel blunt and plain. Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons presented a menswear collection that can’t be easily classified in a couple of words. It’s utilitarian, but super-sensual, gritty, but somehow also polished, oversized, but skimpy too. You kind of want to hate it at first, but then… you get it. The third look – a fringed print white shirt and black schoolboy short – had just passed by on the industrial meshed steel runway. Suddenly, irregular lines of slime started oozing from the ceiling, falling on either side of the models. It settled into a pale green puddle as it slowly drained away. In its free fall sticky state, the gunky stuff that waterfalled down looked like something left by the alien in Alien, or a snail, or humans… after having a good time. “Now, in this time, we have to inject fantasy again, ideas,” Mrs. Prada afterwards. Together she and Raf Simons dressed their spring 2024 men in outfits that echoed the relationship between that rigid runway mesh and the glinting plasma that spurted from and through it. The starting point was a tailored silhouette featuring broad shoulders bolstered by (removable) pads, a cinched waist, with elongated jacket skirts and sleeves. Below were high waisted bottom halves that (when not hemmed as shorts mid thigh), ballooned around the groin from the naval thanks to generous side pleats before tapering down to the ankle.

Simons said that this silhouette was meant to echo the heroically enhancing tailoring paradigm of the 1940s. It was Prada-fied through a process of reduction and enlightenment: archaic heavy wools were upgraded with ultralight modern equivalents, and instead of the heavy architecture of tailored construction, those jackets were as unconfining as the lightest poplin shirt. “When we think about the body we also think about the idea of the inside and the outside, about the way a body is not still. Very often in the sartorial, it ends up being a very architectural construction and the body is partly restricted,” concluded Simons. Through and from this heavy-looking but ultra-light starting point, other elements began to push, ooze, or burst to the surface. There were those floral shirts, whose fringing and sleeves took them one evolutionary Prada step beyond its signature Hawaiian shirts. There were traditional shirts that had been subject to a freakish growth spurt, transformed into full length coats. There was a section of constriction free denim jeans topped by functionally expansive multi pocket work gilets and then fine-gauge knit shirting in navy, through which luxuriant furry tufts appeared to be sprouting. Being Prada, this menswear collection was designed to stimulate the cerebrum as much as any other body part. But it was also consistent with the recently-repressed animal urge also unleashed at DSquared2 this menswear season. Masculine sexuality, of whatever flavor and inclination, is coursing through the runways of Milan once more.