MILAN — Pity the well-shod in Milan this week. Men’s wear editors and retailers — a population given to expensive shoes — have been confronted with runways unpaved and laid with all manner of sole-scuffing irritants. At Stefano Pilati’s show for Ermenegildo Zegna on Saturday, one tramped through dirt to arrive at a seat; at John Varvatos the next day, there was a damp blanket of fall leaves; at Salvatore Ferragamo the day after, more earth. One is an exception and two is a coincidence, but three, as the singsong saw goes, is a trend.
Many
designers beat a retreat from the city this show season, away from the
ever-multiplying demands of technology, to the dusty corners outside
cellphone range. (Anyone who follows the fashion industry may sympathize
with the feeling of being pecked to death by a million nearly identical
Instagram photos of the runways.) Even while pushing the technological
underpinnings of their collections ever further, they romanticized the
unspoiled and pristine — understandably enough, as Nature, ever an
inspiration and a goad, is the ultimate designer. Silvia Venturini
Fendi, who spent her holidays away from gray Milan, could admit that
“the most beautiful colors” she’d admired on vacation, “you will never
achieve with dyeing fabrics.”
Massimiliano Giornetti explained the dirt-floor runway and the jungle projections that made the backdrop of his Salvatore Ferragamo
show by pointing to his inspiration: folk-art pieces wrought by
soldiers and sailors traveling abroad, crafting their experiences for
families and fiancées back home. “It was new territories, new land,” he
said afterward. “In a season when everything is becoming more and more
technological, I was into telling a story about the experience of the
senses.”
But
the senses were more blunted than stimulated by much of what had come
down the runway. The overgrown craftsmanship of enormous hand-knit
scarves and embroidered outerwear was impressive, but even in a season
when protection seemed to be fashion’s reigning raison d'être, it was
hard to see through the bundle, and occasionally odd when one did. It is
truly the man who has everything who will want a beautiful
double-breasted plaid overcoat painstakingly embroidered with a giant
baboon.
Like
Mr. Giornetti, Ms. Venturini Fendi leaned into tech to create her
collection, laser-cutting and heat-bonding the shearling, leather and
fur that are the label’s signature. “The more technology is used, the
more you want to get back to materials,” she said. “We are always more
into technologies. In the end, we like to be connected to real things.”
At
Fendi, the eye deceives — that’s the house trick. So what looked like
corduroy turned out to be shearling that had been “engraved,” what
seemed to be pinstripe were actually lines cut into the fabric of a
suit. Ms. Venturini Fendi spun a fantasy about taking a break in the
park, a place to pop a Fendi soccer ball out of a Fendi backpack and
kick it around without a care. It was a return to youth as much to
nature, given the English schoolboy slant of the collection, though the
sweet naïveté suggested by its boyish penny loafers, prep-school scarves
and uniform blazers was undercut by the feats of sophisticated
engineering that made each leather or shearling jacket fully reversible.
Kean Etro, like Mr. Giornetti and Ms. Venturini Fendi, worked primarily in earth tones for his Etro collection. He, too, had an eye fixed on the world beyond the city limits.
“Culture comes from agriculture,” Mr. Etro, a lay philosopher, pronounced. “I think people forgot.”
Behind
his runway, a film played of exotic beasts in empty palazzi: Tigers
purring, elephants trumpeting. It vibed, if that is the word, with
Etro’s trademark infusion of Italian finery with exotic spirit. Thus the
rugged suggestion (if not necessarily reality) of safari-style suiting,
and the rich texture and patina of his corduroys and velvets, some
printed whisperingly (or loudly) with the Etro-signature paisley. “You
have always the Indian soul, the paisley soul,” Mr. Etro said, though
the soul is more paisley than Indian that animated a velvet tracksuit.
But wild as the collection was — devolving at the end into full-tilt
grooviness — in its own idiom, it made perfect sense.
