Reviews of Versace, Marni, Sportmax, Boss, Marco Rambali, & Philipp Plein Spring 2021 Fashion Shows
In Search of Community and Authenticity
By Long Nguyen
The inaugural Prada show yesterday with the joint creative team of Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons gave Milano a huge lift in fashion and in spirit. The show, in fact, gave fashion a light out of the doldrums that is the Spring 2021 collections season. Prada and Simons showed the way forward by asking what is relevant now and how to bring their pasts to the present and how to connect to the reality of today. “Whether it’s information or anesthetic, it only makes sense when it works at that moment in time,” Simons said in the post-show joint interview.
In the shows for the rest of this Milano season, and perhaps even more critically for the Paris shows next week, it is imperative for designers to address their collections to speak to this time, not in finding new formats or platforms to show, but in looking at their ideas on fashion and asking how they can make clothes relevant now.
Short of creating moments of catharsis, most design collections of today feel as if they are stealing ‘moments’ of the past from those that in their time, made a contribution and a difference. Where is the authenticity? How do you expect your customers to believe in your vision and house if it is not authentic?
It feels as if fashion is on the top of a cliff about fall into the deep sea and making clothes based on someone else looks from the 1970s, and that simply won’t do.
However, watching the hour-long Marni live stream from around the world on YouTube was like hitting the restart button, and for that length of time, consumed by the live feeds of multi-screens, I got the sense that fashion may be on a firm footing again.
Far far from the noises of the fashion capitals where designers are desperately searching for relevance and authenticity, meanings were all there for all to see on the multi-screen broadcast from the street, the bedroom, the living room, and the dining room of the kids around the world.
VERSACE
Sfilate
“Digital shows we have to do it, it’s not a choice. The future is digital as we can reach so many more people,” Donatella Versace said in a pre-show broadcast of her live stream physical show were all members of the audience sitting on broken columns were members of the Versace company with no external guests invited.
“Go through this moment of disaster with your head high and soon in the near future we will be together again,” Versace said before showing her spring co-ed collection where softer shapes in the bright colors and prints conveyed a joyful summer ahead in a very Versace way with the house signature prints, colors and sinuous dresses.
Models in slick wet coiffure wore clean lines and sharp cut clothes that brought together most the classics signature styles of the Versace fashion vernacular created and nurtured both under the creative helm of Gianni and Donatella. The new crop of guys and girls meandered around the sand and dust walkway littered with fallen Roman statues and broken columns including the stone head of Medusa, the Versace brand insignia. It is apt for the Versace house to use these Roman statues as the house has always had an association with these Roman figures whether it is the Medusa or some of the statues in the family’s art collections in the past.
In a submerged undersea fictional town called Versacepolis that imagined the remains from the great fire of Rome in the year 64 under Emperor Nero now flooded long ago and populated with creatures wearing colorful clothes, Versace imagined that fashion will rise from the crisis of the pandemic in a heroic act of resistance of staging a full collection live show with a collection that showed the power of control and of restraint with a few outfits that could have easily gone overboard like the micro-short cocktail dress with rigid wave pattern foldings by simply making these dress even sexier and with more embroideries and more flamboyant even in attitudes, things that in the past would have been just so natural at Versace but now gone.
Instead of veering into the familiar territory of extravagance and at times, overdone clothes, Versace carefully controlled her affinities for these excesses and made clothes that felt calmer and more right for now. For women there were the navy pinstripe jackets with hot shorts, colorful silk pleats mélange of skirts, tops and bras, colorful satin silk tiered ruffles skirts with black bra top, orange silk pleats strap long dress with front ruffles, and a few of the house’s archival colorful sea creature print on short dresses or micro skirt with cropped corset tops. Donatella Versace knows her women and she has not abandoned them by not giving them the kind of sexy clothes they craved for. And these women could still have it all in the silk sea creature print short dress with embroidered square neck and short puff sleeves. The beachwear was great and fun.
The menswear was particularly strong with a diverse range. The dressy slim fitted navy pinstripe suit with a green shirt, the white tracksuit with print trims, the multicolor dots stretch surfer tee and long wool short, the solid or mixed colored jackets and pants, and the yellow and orange sea print sleeveless parka and short were some of the range between smart tailoring and casual high energy surf style street looks.
I wanted to create something disruptive, something that could be in tune with what has changed inside all of us. To me, that meant dreaming of a new world. A world made of popping colors and fantastic creatures and a world in which we can all coexist peacefully. This collection has an upbeat soul and is optimistic, dreamy, positive. These are the clothes that bring you joy.
– Donatella Versace
MARNI
Live Digital
Francesco Risso, a graduate of New York’s Fashion Institute of Technology and London’s Central Saint Martins, has been at Marni as the brand creative director since 2016 upon the exit of the founder Consuelo Castiglioni who founded the label in 1994 and sold her company to OTB at the time.
In these short years, Risso has managed to completely transform Marni’s aesthetic from before the OTB sale saved for perhaps the brand ethos of playful clothes and innovative use of fabrics that continued now in different manifestations. What Risso has achieved with his designs for Marni should be a lesson for those brands on the precipice of creative changes and the importance of letting the new designer do their work. Stop worrying so much about heritage and stuff like that because less and less young people – the new demographic target for luxury brands – know it. They care for values and community and yes some fashion along the way.
Explaining and expounding on crafts is useless because these kids expect perfectly made merchandise but surely don’t tell them how this stuff is made before they buy.
Risso and his team created different outfits among themselves during the lockdown using whatever materials and fabrics available to them. “This collection is about making things: stapling, scribbling, clashing bits, and pieces all together in the studio,” Risso explained. Adding, “Cropping a coat, slashing a bathing suit to turn it into a tank top, gluing a thick sole to a pair of shoes, adding an extra-long zip to a bag to make it look like a torpedo, cutting a tutu in two. Long, short, lean, roomy, frayed, patent, cotton, leather, gauze, and then flowers, stripes, and words: it’s a complete deconstruction of shapes, textures, and patterns.”
Beauty makes a pair with rebellion, celebrating the openness of the unfinished.” Risso described the circumstances of the making of the collection.
– Francesco Risso, Creative Director Marni
His vision reminded me all those young designers I’ve met along the way with little resources but manging to pulled together 20 looks collections that changed the course of fashion.
When these elemental garments were completed, Risso sent them to friends and the Marni family-at-large in various cities including New York, Paris, Dakar, Tokyo, London, Milan, Los Angeles, Detroit, and Shanghai. In a live digital hookup from these different cities, except for East Asia due to time differences, each wore the clothes mixing the Marni garments with their own and participated in a joint live broadcast from all over the globe fostering that spirit of community.
“The process of wearing things individually, in life, sharing the views that make a global community. The process of exchanging ideas, too, and those ideas and thoughts turned into words that run allover pieces of clothing,” Risso explained.
Only other fashion designers understand that this process of community building, not brand building, is the essence of fashion for young people.
By the way the clothes are superb. Flare cotton red print coat, and striped cotton dress, black and white jacket with white pants, boat neck long red print dress, cotton red print zippered jacket and oversize pant (a new form of a suit), an oversized ecru patch pockets short sleeve jacket and matching XXL pants with splashed red paint (a new form of a suit), or a patchwork cotton hand painted coat with tee shirt and hand painted ecru toile long skirt were some of these superb garments – all of them showing the handiwork and the special touches far removed from the process of modern clothes making.
The clothes feel handmade, and created by the hands of those people devoted to the Marni community. The men’s long sweatshirt-dress composed of different pieces of cut-out and re-sown sports tank tops was, well …. what is the right word for an end result of creativity, devotion? Perhaps love.
This one is not about clothing, and yet it is all about the clothing. Clothes as collective connectors creating a community and coming from a community. Clothes as vehicles from freedom and self-expression. The ‘I’ that’s been traditionally associated with the narrative fashion turns into a ‘We.’ The necessity, unity, inequality, beauty, isolation, intimacy, retrenchment, change and struggle to make this very moment ask for this.
– Francesco Risso, Creative Director Marni
“This is a collective effort.” Risso is right on point about this collectivity.
SPORTMAX
Sfilate
Grazia Malagoli, the designer of the Sportmax collection, has been working at Max Mara on their ‘sister’ line since 1979 and has been its creative director since 1982. Malagoli is the soul of Sportmax as she has shaped all these years what the brand is from the aesthetics to the clothes in its totality.
Malagoli sent out a Sportmax collection in a live show at the Triennale with sparse seating that was grounded in the “technical materials combined with fabrics that are soft to touch, illuminated by plays of transparency and colorful layered prints” with a tight fitted long black sleeveless dress, stretched white pinstriped double breast slim pantsuit, sheer pinstriped long sleeve tee shirt over a cropped cotton tank and long skirt, oversized ecru long coat paired with striped sheer tulle body overlaying bra and high waist shorts, or long light brown fitted ankle-length dress.
The intention of the wet hair and natural makeup was to reflect the mood portrayed by the actresses Romy Schneider in the 1969 film La Piscine by French director Jacques Deray about the drama of sexual jealousy and possessiveness and Emmanuel Béart in the 1994 film L’enfer Henri-George Clouzot – the magnetic on-screen personas of the heroines provided the template for the strong women envisaged by Malagoli as today’s young women. However artful Malagoni tried to imbued her collection with sentiments and moods of past movies and actresses in them, how the clothes she showed at the Triennale spoke and conveyed the aesthetics created in those films remained foggy.
In clothes, Malagoni played with contrasts with such an expert handling of the chosen mixtures of fabrics and cuts that the different layers and textures juxtaposed harmoniously with little clashing. A light brown satin masculine coat with a grey slim pants or a grey tailored jacket with extra long sleeves over a dark grey knit bodysuit provided these intentional contrasts
Malagoni also referenced the poem I Sing the Body Electric written in 1855 by Walt Whitman, citing the specific verses – “Women … you are the gates of the body, and you are the gates of the soul.” A magnificent poem indeed but it was difficult to reconcile these Whitman verses to Malagoli’s new spring collection clothes.
BOSS
Sfilate
Boss returned to Milano exactly two decades after its first showing at the Palazzo del Senato with a live show on the same grounds in an open courtyard with a co-ed collection about renewal. The collection focused on craft manufacturing coupled via a collaboration with the artist William Farr whose floral and metal motifs enlivened the clothes with colorful embroideries and prints.
In the past few years, Boss has been strategically moving away from its image as primarily a men’s suit maker, albeit the type of business suits that are less and less prominent as the sartorial preference of the business community. Even Goldman Sachs abandoned formal business dressing at the office since 2017 first for the digital and tech businesses, and then in 2019, firm-wide.
Changes in dressing attitudes, particularly when the decree came from top investment banking firms that were the last in the business community to accept casualization, has been a transformative trend in traditional men’s fashion in the last two decades. These changes have been incremental and like anything in men’s fashion, took place at a snail’s pace. This surely impacted Hugo Boss’ approach to its prime brand collection – Boss.
Ingo Wilts, the Boss designer, did not in fact abandoned tailoring but instead he found ways to make tailoring more casual especially in the opening segment of the show where the very conservative looking tailored double breast six-button jacket paired with satin cargo pants and a cotton hooded sweatshirt, a wool business coat now worn with suede shorts, a single-breast suit in the form of a tailored jumpsuit, and a tuxedo jacket paired with a drawstring running shorts – all in the different hues of light aqua blue. A tailored garment mixed with a casual item erased its sense of formality. Wilts constructed these garments with a sense of lightness and movement, further taking away its dressy connotations.
The more fashion portion came in the second half with all the colorful prints on white and ecru cotton and wool made by William Farr on coats, sweatshirts, shorts, pants, and raincoats. Some of the blue looks found their cousin counterparts in pink fuschia, white, light green ad-light brown gabardine, cotton or suede fabrics.
The show did not break any new ground but then this was not the expectation. Instead, Wilts provided new clothes, new impetus, and new suggestions to wear them in a more casual world.
In an age where environmental consciousness is noted, Boss will donate the 40 acacia trees that served as show décor to the city of Milano.
MARCO RAMBALDI
Sfilate
It is difficult to look at Marco Rambaldi clothes in the recent three seasons that he had shown in Milano and understand what the designer stands for and what kind of message he is sending through his clothes.
A 2013 graduate in Fashion Design at IUAV University of Venice, the 30-year-old designer is too young not to take any risks at all. Instead, in each of his shows, his clothes have felt at best vintage, and at worst lacking direction. For this season’s outing, there were colorful hand-knit long crochet sheath dress, black and aqua blue bras paired with black knit floral pants or light mauve pleated long skirt, brown floral knit short dress, a multi-fabric cotton patchwork patch pocket shirt, and skirt, long floral fitted dresses, or orange polo long sleeve knit tied at the midriff and worn with a patchwork denim short skirt.
Is Rambaldi’s idea anti-fashion designer clothes? Anti-luxury? Hard to say since he didn’t provide any indication beyond the feel that these do-it-yourself clothes are worthy to stage an actual physical show. For a fashion show, a point of view is imperative.
But from the look of the clothes, Rambaldi has the knowledge and the craft technicality to make the garments. He needs now to think about the reasons why he wants to do fashion and more importantly give his audience this personal rational through his clothes in future seasons.
PHILIPP PLEIN
Digital
You have to credit Philipp Plein for his enthusiastic embrace of fashion and the way he has always wanted to bring his fashion to the masses with a sense of grandeur, at least before the lockdown. In his July digital presentation for men’s, he showed a documentary video recounting his own adventures in fashion starting from his first small showroom presentation in 1998 to his first fashion show to his mega shows like the one in Brooklyn for Fall 2018 when he turned the Duggal Greenhouse into a winter land complete with a faux snowstorm and a performance by Migos, or his two-hour-long double show dinner at the Four Seasons in New York.
Plein’s sense of the possibilities and love of fantasy shouldn’t be dismissed so quickly, particularly now when his penchant for enthusiasm is so necessary.
Even when constricted and constrained, there is always room for imagination.
In a short film shot at his compound in Monaco entitled ‘I Know What You Did Next Summer,’ Plein presented his scale down 21 looks surrounded by a giant yacht, a helicopter, jet-ski and so forth. Despite the setting, the clothes were scaled back that his previous outing, with less of the overboard embroideries and studded embellishment on every available fabric surfaces. This season Plein opted for streetwear essentials like a cropped top, blouson, anoraks, short dress acid wash jeans in ultra-soft fabrics, and bold motifs prints. Among the more dressy items were a green leopard print slit dress, a series of black beads clutches, a white coat, and a few of the black and white windowpane sparkling dresses for evening boat parties.
None of the clothes were the extravaganza sorts of his previous collection, but then who really needs fancy clothes when they are already on a superyacht.