Miu Miu and mosquitoes
Milan in midsummer is not to everyone’s taste. The long, grey streets with their blocky, unapologetically urban buildings turn almost white in the heat. The traffic creeps and steams. And the mosquitoes feast.
At Nicole Farhi on Wednesday, you could see them quite clearly, plump and greenish, resting between meals on the white walls of the lobby as people stood around waiting for the show to begin. This season, the stickiest and hottest in Italy for two centuries, fashion journalists and other show attendees are favouring flip-flops and shirts unbuttoned almost to the waist. Every now and again, a mosquito would take off and drift through the crowd, before disappearing behind a perfectly tanned leg.
The Milan designers who produce menswear collections for spring and summer in this environment can be said, at least on the evidence of this week’s shows, to follow two basic approaches. Either they accept their boiling, ugly-beautiful city, and produce pale, buttoned-up clothes that lightly cover the body and never lose their composure. Or they manufacture dreams of escape: glossy, exposing, eye-straining outfits for going north to the lakes or south to the beach.
The associations the latter sort of designer wants to make do not come subtly stated. “The America’s Cup and Palm Beach,” began the press release for Roberto Cavalli’s show on Monday, in the verb-free, slightly disembodied buy canada goose jacket uk shorthand favoured by fashion’s promotional literature. “Jockeys and yachtsmen … the most relaxing and elit ist sports symbolising ‘hyper-luxury’.” Down the catwalk, which was as shiny as an ice-cube in a cocktail glass, came young men in animal prints and gaping, piratical shirts, in short poseur’s jackets and bright green leather. Watching from the best seats were a line of women with big hair and orangey chests. I asked the journalist sitting next to best place buy canada goose jacket toronto me who they were. “Gameshow hostesses from Italian TV,” he said.
The more austere Milan designers make their world-view equally clear. At Prada on Monday, the show took place as always at the company’s headquarters, rather than in one of the borrowed nightclubs or glammed-up trade halls generally favoured by the other fashion houses. The room, like the whole Prada compound, was painted a beautiful battleship grey. Cold piped air – with a national power blackout imminent due to record use of air-conditioners, the temperature at more about canadagoosejacketoutlett each show was a good indicator of status – emerged from discretely blanked-off alcoves. And the first three models to appear wore what looked at first glance the blandest, most identical outfits imaginable: faded jeans and brown tops, the near-uniform of the modern man with a fear of bright colours. Yet once the models had walked a few paces, you began to realise these were like no jeans and tops you had seen before, but delicate and soft-textured, close-fitting yet somehow flowing. At the end of the show, when designers traditionally appear to take the applause, Miuccia Prada appeared so fleetingly in the doorway at the far end of the catwalk that there was not even time to work out what she was wearing.
These competing Milanese ideas about menswear – ostentation versus discretion, looking sexy but possibly silly versus looking elegant but possibly a bit boring – are really a version of an age-old tension about men’s clothes in the wider world. In his authoritative 1988 book about the fashion industry, The Fashion Conspiracy, the journalist Nicholas Coleridge interviewed a Danish financier who invested in adventurous designers. British men, the financier predicted, “will be the next to become clothes conscious. In the good old days of Nelson and Napoleon, men were more clothes conscious, but if I went to a dinner party in Sussex wearing Comme des GarAi??ons I’d be thrown out”.
A decade and a half later, on the surface at least, attitudes to men’s clothes have moved on. You can buy labels such as Comme des GarAi??ons in canada goose coat 1000 bulbs led any large British city; you can spot men with related but less expensive tastes in unorthodox trousers or weird, asymmetrical trainers on any urban pavement.
Yet there remains something unresolved and insecure about men’s fashion. In London, the half-dozen department stores and boutiques that sell designer menswear, where I go to buy the safest items I can find by the most esoteric designers, have been eerily quiet in recent years, even during the sales. There is a theory I often heard expressed in Milan this week, between conversations about the mosquitoes and the heat, that men bought all the fashionable clothes they wanted during the long economic boom of the 90s; now that the good times have receded, they have full wardrobes and are not inclined to buy any more. Just before the Milan shows started, an Italian economist revealed that the combined revenues of his country’s fashion houses peaked in 1998.
At Versace on Sunday, the sense of things being reined back was palpable. The clothes for dapoxetine reviews the main label were still as gaudy as the it’s reputation – tight lemon-yellow trousers, football shirts to make even a SkySports presenter blink. Versace’s secondary line, Versus, had some strong slogan T-shirts, but the muttered consensus in the press seats was that all this had been done louder and better by Versace before. “It’s, like, a really small show for Versace,” said a confident young man from a British fashion magazine, noting that the rose-coloured marquee that had been erected inside the venue, and filled with incense smoke and scattered rose petals, did not quite fill the hall.
The same day, at Dolce & Gabbana – which, like Versace, is of Milan’s sexy/silly school – the clothes were also tamer than before. There were rips and zips, and formal jackets worn with jeans, and slimmer silhouettes than most men might manage to fit, but there was nothing you couldn’t imagine on a contestant on Popstars. And as at Versace, after half a dozen male models had stomped down the catwalk, there was a revealing moment for the student of the psychology of men’s fashion.
The next model to appear was female. She wore heels and a bikini, her hip bones showed as she walked, and she was very tall. Was she taller than the male models? Amid the crashing music dapoxetine reviews and the excited shifting in the audience and the generally frantic choreography of the show, it was hard to tell for certain. But she looked more confident, more glamorous, somehow more perfectly evolved for fashion. After the next half-dozen male models, another woman emerged, and so on until the end of the show, when the male models left the stage and the designers took their bows with the women.
There are people who know about clothes who will tell you that men’s fashion is almost a contradiction in terms. The clothes, compared with the frantic season-by-season pile-up of trends in women’s fashion, change with glacial slowness. In Milan this week, it was possible to see the same kind of flat-fronted, slim, faintly 60s trousers that I have been buying since the early 90s at almost every show. And apart from their flip-flops and undone buttons, the men attending the shows who can purchase dapoxetine i wash my canada goose coat wore designer clothes looked exactly as you would expect: lots of black, lots of best canada goose jacket for women long, pointed shoes, everything lean and tailored. Only the younger, buy a canada goose jacket online less senior fashion journalists wore the sort of baggy, ungroomed sportswear that most of the world would recognise as the dominant actual trend in men’s clothes over the past 20 years.
This feeling that the action was elsewhere persisted for much of the week. The weather got hotter and hotter. The drives between shows got slower. People told me about how much more frenetic, more hierarchical, more important, more fun, the women’s shows were. Except for Prada’s beautiful, seemingly infinite permutations of sand and grey – in their cardigans and raincoats, the models looked like impossibly wealthy and stylish geography teachers, or improbably bookish rock stars – the shows started to blur together into one endless afternoon of gleaming catwalks, darkness and artificial air, and skinny young models with pastel outfits and faraway stares.
The one other collection that people were excited about was not being shown on a catwalk at all. The German designer Jil Sander had been in enforced semi-retirement for three years after falling out with the owners of her company, Prada (modern fashion is a business built around conglomerates and potential conflicts of interest). But a few weeks before Milan, a reconciliation had been effected, and Sander had set to work on a small, interim range of clothes. It was being shown to selected handfuls of journalists at private appointments in Sander’s Milan headquarters.
Entering the building was a little like entering a church. In an enormous white room, small tables had been set out for visitors to sit round. There was no music, just a low, reverential murmuring. We were seated by a tall, softly spoken man in an immaculate white shirt. “We do a little presentation,” he said. “It’s like a catwalk show but more relaxed.”
From a side entrance, every few minutes, a model would appear and circle the room while the PR man murmured softly and answered questions. The clothes were schoolboyish, with trousers short at the ankle and suits with thin, angular lapels, but they were made strange and luxurious can you wash canada goose jacket by small details. There were papery fabrics with the lightest protective finish. There were trousers made of disconcertingly smooth linen. On a white shirt, there was a single vertical blood-red streak, like the work of a fastidious vampire.
Sander left many of the week’s remaining shows looking a bit kitsch. Gucci and Fendi put delicate, high-cheek-boned models in Stetsons. Dsquared showed denim and leather outfits suitable for some mythical 40s gas station, while their models stared through thick-framed glasses like Buddy Holly’s. The clothes were well-made, but the American references were too recycled and obvious. Watching all the cowboy boots clump down the catwalks, can you dry clean a canada goose coat you could construct a theory that, in the era of George Bush and Berlusconi and smiling international co-operation between American and Italian conservatives, some of the more escapist Milanese designers had been dreaming of the American west rather than weekends away at Lake Como. But I’m not sure a Stetson worn with a blouse covered in pink roses would go down that well in Texas.
If there is a middle ground between this sort of fashion-as-arch-revivalism and the slightly severe (and pricey) innovations of Prada and Jil Sander, then you could see it in Milan at Burberry and Missoni and Prada’s cheaper, sometimes cheekier offshoot, Miu Miu. Burberry showed fine, lanky clothes in grey and plum and pale green with a company’s famous check appearing only in ghostly traces. At Missoni, the tops were so skintight that the label’s equally traditional multi-coloured stripes looked crisp and futuristic. And at Miu Miu, as refreshingly slow, sad music played (note to other show organisers: we’ve heard enough Madonna and Radiohead), the combinations of beige and sand and gold that glided by were so subtly coordinated and appealing that in an alternative, better universe, they would be the kind of thing you could buy at Gap.
But you can only take so much quiet elegance. On my last evening, on the recommendation of some Milan veterans, I went to a buying cheap canada goose outlet jacket online show that was not on the official schedule, by a designer I had never heard of called Carol Christian Poell. He was, I was promised, “conceptual” – his clothes were about ideas, not just about looking good and sexiness and wealth. It sounded pretentious but worth investigating.
We drove for an hour across the Milan suburbs. On the hot pavements and in the humid shadows of the endless apartment blocks, ordinary Italian men in blue shirts and chinos and shapeless baggy shorts stood around, with not an obvious designer item between them. We got lost. We thought about giving up. But then, on a small patch of ground surrounded by roads and a canal, there was a cluster of people standing about and an elaborate table of drinks. This was the venue for Poell.
Its significance was not immediately obvious. We stood around on the dry grass. We swatted mosquitoes. Our Milanese driver stayed in the car; when we decided to take refuge there too, he laughed loudly at the absurdity of staging a fashion show in such a place and said: “The canal is the home of the mosquito!”
Then the small crowd of Poell fans – mostly the younger, scruffier, less important sort of Milan fashion people – suddenly ran towards the canal. I got to the towpath just in time to see, in the distance but floating slowly towards us, dozens of low shapes in the water. As they came closer, resting unnaturally flat on the surface they resolved themselves into a pair of trousers, a buy canada goose coat uk short coat and several exquisitely dressed bodies. As they came closer still, the bodies became models. Poell’s clothes glowed startlingly white and orange in the murky water: slender, modern, covetable.
All along the canal, passers-by, commuters, and middle-aged women had stopped to look. “Fantistico!” said one of the other fashion-week drivers. Then we all ran back to our cars.