Who Scored A Perfect 10 At Milan Fashion Week?

Bottega Veneta and Diesel take some winning risks; Versace and Moschino go spelunking in the archives.

“Judging is an instinct.” “You’re already giving a score to this look in your mind, just express it.” So droned the Voice of God at the Sunnei show over the weekend as Milan Fashion Week drew to a close. Well, who doesn’t know truth when they hear it?

Every member of the audience was handed a group of paddles bearing numbers from 1 to 10 and instructed to rate each look as it appeared, in the sort of fashion meta-commentary on the modern condition that the brand’s designers, Simone Rizzo and Loris Messina, have made their signature.

This season the subject was the court of public opinion that is the social media sphere, where everyone is free to weigh in on everything. And as usual, while the clothes illustrating the issue were good (Sunnei is essentially grunge for the thinking person), even better was the point.

Sometimes that can be hard to find under the profusion of “real clothes,” razzle-dazzle showmanship and archive-diving that currently seems to be the default in fashion.

Such needle-sharp social commentary used to be the province of Moschino, but the brand is between designers. This year was its 40th anniversary, and rather than throw a party, the owner, Aeffe, decided to invite four celebrated stylists — Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele, Katie Grand, Lucia Liu and Gabriella Karefa-Johnson — to “interpret” the archive in 10 looks each.

But the looks were more about the legacy of Franco Moschino himself than the world outside, which was always his subject. As such, they were also a reminder of just how much difference a creative director with something to say can make. That content creation, a buzz phrase of today, is about more than just producing filler for the voracious viewing maw.

When it comes to clothes, it’s actually another term for design.

Let’s Go Somewhere

This is something that Matthieu Blazy of Bottega Veneta understands implicitly, and it is what makes his collections so extraordinary. He treats each outfit — or maybe two, since his men’s looks and his women’s looks often seem to come in pairs, like on Noah’s Ark — as its own idea. Or maybe its own country, given that the floor of his show space was tiled to resemble a mythic world, complete with continents and flying fish, over which a flood of global nomads roamed.

They started out simply, in neat black suits and a little black dress, the straps just beginning to unpeel from the shoulders, and then built in increasingly wild amalgamations of texture and type: three-dimensional knits tracing new body topographies; a leather dress that cross-referenced panniers and tribal fringe; a halter covered in tiny blue scales that segued into silk strands that shifted over a pen-and-ink print like water.

Some were plain old weird (fishnet dresses with balls of fluff sprouting all over like seedpods), but many more were eye-poppingly good. “Let’s go somewhere” went the soundtrack, and the whole show was like an argument for appreciating process and the allure of exploration rather than any single destination.

Heading off into the unknown is an increasingly endangered concept. Luke and Lucie Meier are flirting with it at Jil Sander, expanding the bounds of what that brand can be with smart experiments in volume, matching skinny ribbed knits with stiff balloon skirts and turning big shirts back to front, but it’s early stages. You get the sense that Maximilian Davis could do really interesting things at Ferragamo — see his finale gown, with its layers of black chiffon trapped under a breastplate of glossy leather, with sections that looked as if they had been eaten away — though he is still being overly tethered to the leather legacy.

Indeed, shorts, especially very short shorts, were the trend in almost every collection. As Miranda Priestly might say, “Shorts? For spring? Groundbreaking.”

Couture For The Climate Apocalypse

For that, look to Glenn Martens at Diesel, who (like Blazy) is turning into one of the most compelling designers in Milan. He’s a technical genius who understands how to use clothes to tell a story and is willing to go out on a limb to do it.

Or rather, to invite 6000 members of the public — 1000 students plus 5000 fans who snapped up the tickets online in 15 minutes — to an open-air rave sponsored by Bulldog gin and capped by the Diesel runway show projected on a screen 85 by 46 feet that later was used for an outdoor film festival.

It had a chaotic, end-of-the-world energy that is reflected in Martens’ clothes, which increasingly seem like couture for the climate apocalypse.

He does things with surface treatments that don’t seem possible: corrodes jersey and denim into sheer nylon and tulle (Renzo Rosso, the owner of Diesel, is trying to patent the process); shreds deadstock jeans into party dresses; melts and molds old blockbuster movie posters into jackets. Kill Bill as outerwear. Why not?

The result viscerally conveys the beauty in devastation. Another way to say, perhaps, that judgment day is coming.

This article originally appeared in The New York Times.

Written by: Vanessa Friedman

©2023 THE NEW YORK TIMES

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