Magliano is the much-needed antidote to Milan Fashion Week’s gloss and perfectionism. LVMH Prize-winning Luca Magliano does clothes that are functional but at the same time poetically deep. The designer channels a kind of wrong and cramped beauty. In his charming spring-summer 2025 fashion shows, street-casted models sported romantic shirts with asymmetrical closures and folded trousers revealing waistline measurements. Printed, washed denim and faux fading, along with well-worn peacoats in towel-like fabrics, add a touch of artisanship to the offer. Note the striking pops of bubblegum pink, just to balance all that grittiness. The collection is honest in its simplicity, driving expertise through unexpected materials and retro silhouettes pulled into the present with precision.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
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Life is an unexpected journey: that’s the morale conveyed by Adrian Appiolaza‘s first menswear show for Moschino. Before he left Argentina for Europe, the designer once held down a job selling insurance. To present a respectable façade to potential clients, his employer obliged him to wear a company-provided suit. He felt like a prisoner of that ill-fitting, sad suit. That formative trauma collided with something once said by Franco Moschino himself: “it’s better to dress as you wish than as you should.” Appiolaza began his spring-summer 2025 story of resilience and traveling through life with ironic takes on corporate attire. A shirt skirt worn with a real shirt but unreal suspenders and a four-button suit teamed with three hats were amongst the first of many cheeky, archival references. The soccer-ball sweater teamed with a tri-starred baseball cap was a salute back to Argentina, while the Italian flag soccer couple – one with an authentic red sauce splattering! – was a gesture to Appiolaza’s new creative home. Franco Moschino’s recurring goose motif returned in prints on skirts and shirting in a hokey, bucolic countrywear duet. Theclosing looks reminisced something accidental lovers would wear – and get married in – on a nameless island after a ship wreck. The all-white heavy linen suit with a sleeve skirt is a fresh take on groomswear. The models walked their finale around piles of lost luggage that symbolized the tangle of transformational journey narratives. This designer is really on to something with his vision for Moschino.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
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Lucie and Luke Meier are in their experimentation mode at Jil Sander. Gone are the days when their vision of the brand orbited around the idea of minimalism in its traditional, Sander-esque sense. Trying new things is crucial in order to develop and progress your style. But I’m not entirely share the antiquated space-age aesthetic the designers went for their autumn-winter 2024 collection is necessarily a breakthrough. They leaned too much on the diamond quilting, which if overdosed can feel utterly outdated, and the chainmail details are Paco Rabanne’s territory, especially when we’re talking about 1960s sensitivity. As Cathy Horyn wrote in her review, the collection gave “tragically old lady” vibes, and its hard to disagree.
Collage by Edward Kanarecki. Don’t forget to follow Design & Culture by Ed on Instagram!
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At Bottega Veneta, Matthieu Blazy delivered his best collection to date. The reason the autumn-winter 2024 show felt this good was not only because Blazy found a way to make his love for artisan detail finally look light and spontaneous, sprezzatura-way. The Bottega Veneta line-up delivered a sense of authentic style, a true rarity to observe during fashion month. That might have come to Blazy with a change in his creative mindset. “The initial idea was to reduce the collection to almost the function of clothes – only reduce not to the minimum, but to a maximum. I was interested in making a monument out of the everyday.” It started with the first look, a couture-ish black cocoon coat whose rounded, three-dimensional silhouette was the result of the folding in of its sides and sleeves, which were secured with big brass buttons. Unfasten them and the coat becomes more or less flat. The nonchalant, unstudied result is stunning. This season’s clothes are refreshingly stripped back: gone were the embroideries and embellishments that defined last season’s collection, but there was no shortage of impressive workmanship. Blazy said, “I wanted the technique to be in the fabric itself.” A fine example of that was the “memory” prints made from layer upon layer of passport stamps that he used for a trio of willowy looks with swooping tiers on their skirts. As we see 2024 fashion unveil, there’s a strong flux of “everyday” clothes; amid all the crises, the understandable tendency among design houses and their executives is to play it safe. As we’ve seen so far this season, that can lead to same-y fashion, indistinguishable from one runway to the next. Blazy is immune to that risk.
A couple of my favorite artisan masterworks coming from Blazy’s Bottega…
Simone Bellotti‘s sophomore collection for Bally was Milan Fashion Week’s quiet star. This is the line-up where actually something cool happened. The designer found that sense of “cool” in a place that doesn’t necessarily affiliate with “coolness“: Zurich. Its street style and ambience inspired Bellotti and the autumn-winter 2024 runway; simultaneously drawing upon the pastoral symbolism of Swiss folklore and Alpine mysticism, the designer has managed to create a truly distinct vocabulary for Bally within a year of his tenure. Steering clear of literal translations, he combined severity and grace, austere poetry and functional Swiss precision. On a neat double-breasted swing loden coat, the skirt flared into the shape of a treichein bell; a masculine crisp poplin shirt, tucked into high-waisted jeans, was worn under a knitted gilet revealing a furry back, hinting at a wilder, less disciplined side. Like the soft pelt of an untamed creature, a fur insert peeked out from under a strict, asymmetrical knee-length felted wool dress, held on one side by a silver safety pin. Black leather was made into protective yet supple blousons, car coats, and capes. Introducing a cautious note of disorder, a knee-length pencil skirt as well as a masculine waistcoat in black leather were studded with traditional Appenzeller motifs of hearts, cows, and edelweiss interspersed with punkish metallic grommets, hinting at the photographic work of Swiss queer artist Karlheinz Weinberger, whose late-1950s homoerotic portraits were published in the book Rebel Youth. It was a subtle nod to a discourse rooted in the now that makes Bellotti’s work at Bally all the more contemporary and utterly desirable.
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