FLORENCE — Amid endless product and the sideshow of attention-seekers, the impression that stuck most in my mind from the latest edition of the Pitti Uomo trade fair was the platoon of stylishly dishevelled beautiful losers slowly descending and then ascending the massive staircase at centre of the Magliano show set, designed, according to the press notes, as a “device of strain and an impromptu occasion for glamour” but also a homage to Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia.
There was something harshly romantic if a bit formulaic to the vision: an allegory of sorts in which those at the margins, the rejected, the stray dogs, the outcasts, in a kind of utopic reversal, made it to the top, their clothing beaten, torn, crumpled, much like intensely lived thrift store finds; their faces and bodies just as written over by life.
It was a “queer re-match,” in the words of designer Luca Magliano himself, with a sense of bruised classicism at the core, a commentary on our era of socio-economic polarisation and a criticism of the lack of authenticity in most of today’s fashion.
After several seasons of masculinity in flux, Magliano’s focus on classicism and tailoring felt timely and forward looking. The designer delivered his most mature and, yes, classic collection — there was also a suit made by Kiton and sabotaged Borsalino hats — but he did it his own way, in his very Bolognese vernacular, with much queer pathos and binders as the ultimate logo-ed accessory. Did it glue? To a point.
Magliano still hasn’t found the right balance between theory and practice. The raw energy of his early beginnings five years ago is probably gone, while creative maturity has yet to completely kick in. The designer would do well to steer away from obvious references to Comme and Yohji, in order to truly find a voice all his own, and to work on queer-ness in a freer way, doing away with codified edginess.
In this sense, the fascination for beaten humanity and popular elegance were winning concepts, as were the crippledness, the bag lady and bag lord allure, the focus on looking poor rather than rich in a world more and more obsessed with money. Magliano just needs to push the envelope a bit further. He certainly has the skills to succeed.
Being cool is a difficult endeavour today. It always has been actually. Edgy, or being on the edge, requires one to constantly push the action forward and defy expectations. This is why Achilles Ion Gabriel’s debut missed the mark. Edgy, it was, but in a way we’ve seen too much over the last decade: humongous shoulders, loud tailoring, ugly shoes and an avalanche of studded belts on stone-faced beautiful monsters.
The designer, who is doing a terrific job as the creative director of Camper, is a rare bird. His terribly amusing Instagram feed bursts with a unique sense of style. But that uniqueness, sadly, did not translate into the collection, despite it being “very personal” to the designer and utterly genderless, with some remarkable, crumpled slip dresses worn over suits. What’s needed here, as well, is a more original voice that can do away with existing trends — or at least twist them around.
Tailoring and the classics are clearly having a resurgence, and with that a sense of formality, but there is a formal way to do workwear, too, as expressed in the Rovi Lucca gardening-inspired effort, a concise and quietly elegant line up of shirt jackets, vests and fatigues with a family inheritance feel to them.
At the other end of the spectrum, there is reworked vintage and the Vintage Hub section at the fair looked strong, if, at times, a tad homespun. DDSR and Velvet for Philosophers were particularly charming, elevating upcycling to a form of re-creation that was more than patchy decoration. The collaboration between knitwear wunderkinds Vitelli and cashmere suppliers Consinee created wonderful chaos.
Elsewhere, in his first show in four years, Todd Snyder worked on juxtapositions — the formal and tailored versus the informal and slouchy — to represent his idea of modernity.
The show was entitled Modernist but there was nothing remotely Modernist (in the sense of sleek, mid-century design) to it. Instead, it featured an array of oversized tweed tailoring, cosy knits and slouchy velvets, and some skin on show under roomy bermuda shorts, much in a romantic, Dries Van Noten way. It was not the most challenging of proposals, but the product was flattering and desirable.
Pitti closed on a soft note with an ineffable, breezy S.S. Daley show, which despite being held in the magnificent Salone dei Cinquecento in the Palazzo Vecchio had an intimate, sleepy feel and much poetry to it.
Inspired by E.M. Forster’s “The Story of Panic,” the tale of a young man’s trip to Italy with fellow Brits, the show offered a captivating vision of undone formality, and was followed shortly by the announcement that Harry Styles has taken a minority stake in the company. It is a good sign — that the time of soft masculinity has come and its proponents are attracting investment.
