Review of Sunnei, Federico Cina, Dhruv Kapoor, Mans, Tíscar Espadas, Dalpaos, & Philipp Plein Spring 2022 Men’s Fashion Shows
Among the Hefty Fashion Dynasties, An Army of Young Brands Rising
By Long Nguyen
The second full day of the Milano Men’s Spring 2022 program featured a full live show from Dolce & Gabbana at their Metropol theater, where the duo designers ponder their signatures built in the early 2000s and transformed these known styles to the next generation.
Instead of an actual live show that Fendi had staged in mid-January, the brand opted for a short film presentation, actually shot on location around the Rome headquarter.
Otherwise, the day also belonged to young brands slowly emerging into businesses.
Sunnei
For a couple of seasons now, the designer team at Sunnei – Simone Rizzo and Loris Messina – has been experimenting with presenting and selling their fashion in the most conducive manner. Their solution was to create a template of blank canvases of their different designed garment and product and allowed the consumer or store buyer to choose the exact color and materials available for actual fabrication.
Canvas, the Sunnei team’s proposal at the time in July 2020 – Canvas – of using CGI to create the VR platform merging virtual reality with fashion for the Spring 2021 presentation was radical for a young brand with a subversive take on Italian tailoring as a new uniform for the art underground crowd.
For Spring 2022, Sunnei has expanded this VR platform into an IRL experience that will allow real consumers access to the customization. The brand’s high-tech platform allows purchases of genderless and carry-over ready-to-wear and accessories according to their specifications, like choosing fabrics, colors and altering lengths of sleeves or short pants.
This third canvas collection, housed at the brand headquarter, has ecru toile canvas samples next to monitor to help buyers make selections. There are also options to add specific print logo items onto a long sleeve tee shirt. For the brand, this marks the first entry into the B2C arena for Sunnei, and in the next week, customers can visit the Sunnei store-space to order personalized items. The designers explained that buyers from stores would have a different level of selections so that the end products will differ significantly from one store to the next as it would be from one consumer to the next.
It is a wonder to see young brands experiment with how they built their fashion business from creation to wholesalers to retailers adopting new technology to change the way to make and sell clothes, handbags, and shoes.
Federico Cina
“Melancholy full of thoughts, memories of youth, summer relaxation: that maritime atmosphere that we have all been lucky enough to experience at least once in our life. And today, years and years later, remembering with a smile,” was what Federico Cina wrote on his Instagram about his new Spring 2022 collection based on the photographic book ‘Addio Colonia’ by Luigi Tazzari from his Romagna region.
“Infanzia a mare” the title Cina gave to this collection, born from the intimate and personal desire to remember the childhood in the Romagna Riviera in the north-central region of Italy and the Adriatic Sea coastline.
“I remember the days at sea when I was a kid. My own Romagna was this also, the smell of the sun cream, the salty air, and the garbino that caressed the shoulders. The minibus passed by the house at dawn, and we crossed the countryside to get to the sea. I remember the walls of the colonies. They told of loves and friendship suspended between the past and an internally present time,” Cina said of the genesis of his Spring 2022 digital video and his new clothes.
In a moody short film shot at the beach on the Romagna coastline, a voice narrated the memories of a young teenager spending time at the beach. The smell of sand and seawater, the sea air, and wearing a light yellow crochet tank top with ecru linen sailor pants, a simple loose white cotton shirt, black pants, or simply an off-white cotton light towel used as a thwab wrap.
The collection is a change for Cina in terms of design and aesthetics. His past few collections had been ones where the young designers tried to prove his worth by over-designing his garments, pushing the clothes to unusual extremes to prove a point in his ability to think differently. Now, a cropped tan loose short trench and nautical navy pants and a two buttons short boxy large lapel sleeveless jacket and white pants took center stage, opening a new door for these Cina spring clothes.
Dhruv Kapoor
“The real voyage of discovery consists of not seeking new landscapes but in having new eyes” is the quote from the French novelist Marcel Proust that the Indian-born and Delhi-based Dhruv Kapoor used for the video presentation.
Kapoor combines surrealism with an actual studio shooting of his known colorful prints and light embroideries on fine straight-cut coats and jackets.
Kapoor seamlessly moved from street vibes with brown print loose shirts and Bermuda shorts, patchwork sweats, and cargo acid-washed denim to more formal dressing like an oversize black coat with white trimmings or a broad shoulder single breast cloud pattern short pantsuit with such ease without ever losing the touch of adding a bit of humor into his garments. The loose-fit chocolate wool single breast pantsuit with dangling light orange starfishes added a sense of individuality to this nice spring outing.
Mans
Mans 27 years old Spanish designer Jaime Álvarez from Seville in southern Andalusia initially studied womenswear at the Istituto Europeo di Design in Madrid before he switched gear to menswear and graduated in 2017. He saw what in his mind was missing in men’s fashion. Principally, a gap exists between the high-brow world of tailoring and the subculture of youth fashion that gravitated towards the more eccentric elements.
It’s interesting to view adult clothes through the eyes of carefree children and how these ‘children’ clothes are perhaps a more carefree approach to men’s fashion, albeit a far less formal manner of seeing fashion without the aid of visual culture, whether pop or underground.
Álvarez addressed this apparent disparity in adult-child fashion by offering a playful takedown of serious dressing. He combined a brown tailored broad shoulder jacket with a blue front creased hot shorts, orange-pink wave pattern sweater, deep red cotton shirt, a red and light grey pattern single breast hot pantsuit, or a classic pinstripe grey jacket with a midriff cropped knit. A lime green silk drawstring running shorts. Jackets become like undergarments, losing their construction and, more importantly, their power as a garment established over centuries. This free spirit tactic gave his spring collection a youthful and fresh feel without too much of the constraints abiding by trends.
The Spanish designer’s spring video ‘Summer Camp’ gave the joy of relaxing countryside life with young kids wearing colorful clothes, hanging out, and enjoying the sunshine. It sure makes for a compelling post-pandemic mood, not for summer 2022 but the summer right now. In addition, the collection did not have the mood of subculture anguish of another collection from over two decades ago – Raf Simons Spring 1997 ‘Teenage Summercamp.”
Tíscar Espadas
The London-based Spanish designer Tíscar Espadas cemented her interest in menswear during her study at the Royal College of Arts School of Design MA Menswear 2019 graduate.
In this third collection – Capitulo III -for her namesake label founded in 2019 after graduation, Espadas showed her first Milano presentation with a video. Espadas continued many of the themes she had explored in her thesis on the versatility of garments and identity constructions through manipulations of sculptural forms. Espadas’ spring offering delivers of the premises of seasonless clothes appealing to all genders with preferences to exploring technical structure – a given at this moment for all of the new brands with young designers leading.
In this chapter, Espadas used belts in leather and straps or ropes in heavy cotton cloth as an essential accessory to bridge the boundaries of her clothes that tied close to the body as an allusion to the symbolic gestures of the spiritual imagination. That meant a long loose white cotton shirt with a short cotton cape tied at the chest, ropes on a white shirt ruching the backside, or as drawstrings on a red cotton asymmetrical vest. Her two-piece suit comprises a fitted double-fold unlined puffy 3D layered jacket with uneven pressed short pants. Similarly, a khaki coat has an oval cape layered over the front.
As with any young designer starting, Espadas is still in the phase of experimentation, of sorting out her clothes constructions and of settling on an aesthetic premise that can guide her forward. It’s a promising start, but one that would need a firmer grasp on how far fashion is changing today.
Dalpaos
Nicola D’Alpaos is part of the young generation of fashion designers making unisex collections using solely recycled fabrics and materials from old luxury furniture leathers to unsold garments fabric and from rare and unique designs. D’Alpaos is Italian, launched his brand in 2014 with unisex tee shirts, and not part of the young British vanguards working from London hoping to change the ways of the fashion industry.
Based in Udine in northeastern Italy, not far from Venezia, Dalpaos presented a short video around the theme of ‘Palindrome’ with old-style filming of an haute couture type of fashion show where each model held up a number specifying each look within a particular order. At the same time, an announcer read out loud the description of the outfits. However, the models in this film are a mixture of natural and CGI created with the 3D developer Sylwia Anna Szymczyk.
A palindrome is a word that is the same reading in both directions. One of the white tee shirts read ‘Too hot to hoot,’ and another says ‘Ossesso.’
The charming but concise collection has a range of clothes, from a light brown leather shirt suit to a green plaid short suit or an orange canvas coat with black leather pants with hand-painted flowers. Outerwear comprises long coats – trenches in brown cotton and blue leather or a light yellow oversized coat paired with a mustard sweatshirt.
There is a bit of humor in the film couture style video that gives a new meaning to couture – these pieces are unique due to their recycled materials; thus, each garment is different from the others. It isn’t the industrial way but an artisanal approach on a small scale.
Philipp Plein
Nothing can ever be considered excess or overdone in the world of the German-born and Swiss-educated fashion designer and mogul Philipp Plein.
Eschewing his usual extravagant show productions in the past, Plein opted to collaborate with the digital artist Anthony Tudisco in producing a ten minutes long video in a metaverse vision titled ‘Life in Dreams.’
The rocker Travis Barker of Blink 182 provided the loud rock sound and plenty of Plein logoed merchandise on avatars flouncing around the artificial landscape.
It is a surprise to say that the metaverse is in a way limiting Plein’s known habits of excessive runway productions. The Tudisco video is tame with a passage in the wilderness to inside chambers with robots. In real life, splashy shows were the norm, not the exception.
Among the notable shows were the Fall 2018 show at the Brooklyn Navy Yards with faux snow falling while Migos performed, the Fall 2017 show at the New York Public Library, and the four-course dinner show at the Four Seasons Restaurant New York.
The avatars wore everything Plein classic signature products imaginable. That meant pineapple skies prints, burning palm trees, tattoo graphic, and the PP logo or PLEIN logo image and embroidered in every possible iteration on essential baseball varsity jackets, sweatshirts and jumpers with matching pants, white and ecru embroidered denim, white towel lounge robes or a plain light camel blouson and pant with just a small black logo just above the heart on the jacket. In addition, there are lots of silk foulards shirts for a more casual outing.
Plein’s is a particular view of fashion and perhaps of the people who love his maximalist approach. It doesn’t redefine fashion at any season, but it does entice young consumers into this kind of over-the-top clothes.
At least Plein is ahead of other fashion houses in his espousal of the metaverse – this is his second production with Tudisco in artificial fashion film. Perhaps the designer should think about making NFT art out of a few of these extremely decorated garments and sell them as digital art instead of just clothes.