Milan Fashion Week: Italian Men’s Wear Does a Power Edit
Concision — that was the word to come to mind after eight surprising days in this men’s wear capital, and in Florence. Did some unseen force take a blue pencil to all the slack narratives, rehashed inspirations, derivative references that prevail in recent seasons? Suddenly everything seemed crisp and focused, like early Hemingway after he’d learned how to do Gertrude Stein. Designers laboring for decades on narratives as schticky as the plot of an airport novel (we see you, Dolce & Gabbana) discovered urgency and a fresh approach in a tight edit. It must be freeing not to rewrite the same paragraph every season, even if the exigencies of an increasingly industrialized luxury goods market demand that designers repeat themselves. What to do? You could follow the lead of Pierpaolo Piccioli at Valentino, showing his first...
