Reviews of Etro, Les Hommes, Sunnei, Serdar, M1992, & United Standard Spring 2021 Fashion Shows
Day 2 – Fashion for Purpose
BY LONG NGUYEN
Day 2 of the Milan Digital Fashion Week began and ended with live physical fashion shows staged inside and on the outskirts of Milan, but with a different spirit that promotes community and service in addition to the latest selections of Men’s Spring looks.
Etro
Kean and Veronica Etro jointly presented the first physical fashion show today in a small presentation at the outdoor garden of the Four Seasons Hotel in Milan, to celebrate not just their new spring and resort collections but also the act of coming together for a joint, albeit private, show.
“We are finally back together, in the garden of this iconic hotel, in the heart of Milan’s Montenapoleone district. We want to emphasize that we are a family. Etro is a family that lives in a world of joie de vivre, colour and positivity. This season, we want to bring real clothes on stage for real people, discovering a new authenticity. Just what we like, what we think is absolutely relevant, what makes us feel good. Nothing but this,” said the brother and sister team of the purpose of their live presentation.
The patchwork of old fabrics on a blouson paired with a vivid floral print shirt and worn-out jeans worn by the model that opened the show carries the spirit of the brand this season. The jacket is made from archival Etro fabrics, fabrics so rich in texture with a 3D feel to the colorful surfaces. The deep red floral print and the brown tiger printed single-breasted suits are made from signature Etro print fabrics from a house founded in 1968 that has debuted its own fashion collections since 1996.
In keeping with the current values of sustainability, the brand is using eco-friendly and up-cycled archival fabrics, with a special label for the clothes under this scheme of production – BENEETROESSERE – a play on the Italian word for well-being. That the brand can easily achieve this goal is because in addition to the fashion collections, Etro is a major producer of textiles.
The vivid colors of the clothes reflected Kean and Veronica’s push forward, using their clothes as a common vocabulary.
Les Hommes
Tom Notte and Bart Vanderboshe, the Belgian designers and graduates of the prestigious Royal Academy of Fine Arts in Antwerp, formed the label Les Hommes in 2009 to create a consistent collection of refined and well designed and made clothes at approachable price points in the lower end of the luxury market with blazers starting around $1,200 and leather blousons around $1,900, currently available through the e-commerce site Farfetch.
Each season, Notte and Vanderbosche have added pop cultural elements that elevate their essential wardrobe of elegant offerings with specific design elements – Himalayan hiking, nineties rave, seventies punk.
To address a changing mood, the duo forgoes any theme-specific inspiration for this season. Now, the duo has opted for a stark and fast-paced video with blasting music to showcase their new clothes in mostly black, light brown, and white colors with a slim, narrow, and shorter silhouette that often borders on formalwear but with more sporty constructions. Here and there are cameo printed shorts and even a patterned short jumpsuit to break the dress-up ambiance.
The video presentation showed the strength of the brand – those black tuxedo lapel jackets and shorts, those loose black sleeveless vests, and those trenches will surely find their customers come springtime.
Sunnei
Just a year after the brand’s launch, Loris Messina and Simone Rizzo – the duo that forms Sunnei – proposes a new 3D VR platform for the brand with the intent of offering global customers the ability to select and customize select ready to wear, accessories, and bags starting with basic white canvas, to their own liking in this new e-commerce format.
In lieu of an inspirational video, Sunnei is proposing solutions for how fashion brands can deploy new technology in a straightforward and amusing brief video. Now that is truly inspiring.
“An online platform – accessible through password only – is the virtual space hosting the collection thanks to 3D engineering and refined customization technology. Features such as shape, fit, and fabric can be modified digitally while the onscreen appearance of clothing and accessories changes according to the visitors’ choices. Working on the juxtaposition between real life and virtual experience, the brand developed – in collaboration with the Milan based Studio Pezzo di Studio – male and female avatars with human-like features,” said the designers of their new online platform.
Sunnei’s Milan presentation is a short video titled ‘Sunnei Canvas’ featuring multiple avatars wearing some of Sunnei’s spring clothes. In the video, the avatars come to life emerging from a white background, then become more lively and dance around the white space to ‘Macarena’, the mid-nineties Latin hit sensation. The avatars in the video wear long khaki, charcoal and white trench coats, brown loose pants, pink blouson, yellow shorts, and a white parka. Oh never mind the color descriptions. Customers can alter them at will with just one single click.
The designers promise a second installation in the fall with additional products that will focus more on experimentation and art.
That a small brand like Sunnei is offering a partial solution as to how to adopt digital platforms is revolutionary on one side, but on the other it demonstrates how fashion designers can solve problems creatively. How to make the show’s digital experience the same as how customers experience the purchasing of the products isn’t a simple task, but Sunnei makes it look and feel flawless.
Serdar
In his second presentation in Milan, the Turkish born and London based Serdar Uzuntas, a student at Central Saint Martin who started his own label in London in 2010, the designer sat down in a very personal black and white short film about the creation of the spring line in a model fitting format from his London studio, then onto the street where four models are seen hanging out dancing to music at a local park from midnight to midday.
The clothes are casual staples: tee shirts, black leather jacket and grey drawstring pants, a black velvet sweatsuit with white striped trim, or a silver leather blouson and grey workout shorts and a tight-fitting tan denim jacket suit. Nothing wrong with any of these looks.
However, the long video presentation is far too commercial to promote the brand in an effective manner in the digital space, which requires creative acumen to capture the attention, albeit briefly, of net citizens.
M1992
Dorian Tarantini, the designer of M1992, is someone who is certainly very up to date with world events and very conscious in exploring the daily travails that he can turn into his fashion collections with a sense of irony. Last year around this time, Tarantini did a spring collection around the idea of fame and celebrity with images of couples emerging from limousines as prints on sweatshirts.
“It’s a given that not wearing pants can be liberating,” is the statement Tarantini made about his seven-piece top-only-focused spring collection because as he reasoned in the Zoom era, there are less reasons to show pants.
In a subliminal commentary about the effects of Zoom during the lockdown, the short video ‘Brainwashed’ shows several models like Zaccharia in a floral print shirt, Khodi in a black hooded sweatshirt with a Fake News print, and Jaccopo in a white tee with a print of a pink teddy bear inside an open-lidded washing machine.
All the models are filmed in montage in various states of conscious-unconscious due to their addictions to different social media platforms, a condition exacerbated by the lockdown. Throughout his portion in the video wearing a white shirt, Jibril, a Tik Tok addict, is seen repeatedly filming himself dancing.
But at the end, there is hope.
“I learned a long time ago that reality is much weirder than anyone’s imagination. I find it interesting to see people, mostly people who are younger than I am going to considerable trouble to try to reproduce things from an era that was far more physical from a less virtual day. We suffer more from imagination than reality,” Jibril said at the end, offering hope of escape from Zoom land.
United Standard
“’Electric’ were the bonding system this unit narrative forms were entertaining with emotional processes. Volume levels and rhythm of the music acted as an updated ingress to matter: a chaotic approach that takes into account current attention to JUMP_SCARE deployment of storytelling. I do stress the rumble, the image was employing a deafening sound as to produce shock and replicability of this sensation,” read the warning at the start of the three-minute video titled ‘Run! New World Order, No World Order’ that is the official presentation for United Standard in Milan.
The multimedia artist and art director Giorgio di Salvo founded the elevated streetwear brand United Standard in Milan in 2015, consisting of clothing, accessories, and footwear. Standard means uniforms and basic clothes and United means changing them through collaborations with various artists in the community.
After viewing the three minutes video for the second time, I am still at loss as to the meaning of the above statement. However, the video is a documentation of a kid running at first along a small roadway underneath an elevated highway above wearing an ecru print blouson and green shorts with very loud and deafening drum beats as music. The same kid is now seen going up a staircase in a different outfit – an olive jacket and shorts. He changes several more times – black sweats with shorts, black parka suit, olive jacket and pants – as his route takes him to a forest then to the top of a hill where he rests.
The visuals alternate between full-length shots of him running and close up shots where he moves his head to the beats of the drums.
Then the video fades to black again with a statement – “It’s ok if the Only Thing You did Today was Breath. This quarantine make us feels useless losers. To make us forget how much Love, Peace and Creativity we Got out the Capitalism.”
I would guess that the message is an encouragement to get out and create anew. But it’s an art statement and as such the meaning would depend on whoever is reading it.
Epilogue
Standing up and making statements about the relevance of fashion in these turbulent times were the highlights at the end of the second day of Milan’s Digital Fashion Week. Etro staged a small private show in the gardens of a central Milanese hotel, while Dolce & Gabbana did a full spring show in the courtyard of the campus of Humanitas University in the southern suburb.
More than just staging their fashion shows, both Etro and Dolce & Gabbana used their own platform in courageous ways – perhaps defiantly – to affirm their commitment to fashion and to show how fashion serves a real purpose beyond clothes in today’s changing world. Both houses did so today and did so poetically in their own ways – Etro offers the private beauty and Dolce & Gabbana opens the humanism of fashion.
The refrain of ’O sole mio still rings loudly in my ears.