SUMMER 2010
Maya Singer | April 20, 2010
Left: Comme de Garçons Homme Deux; Right: Umit Benan
Do clothes need to be relevant? Wandering the stands at this season’s Pitti Immagine Uomo, the question was difficult to avoid. Outside the walls of Florence’s Fortezza da Basso where Pitti is housed, the world brimmed with miracle and disaster. Citibank begged for a rescue, selling off pieces of itself on the cheap. Stocks tumbled. Gaza burned. A plane landed on the Hudson. Everyone, everywhere, waited for Obama.
Inside the old fort, meanwhile, there were clothes. Suits tailored sharper than a freshly sharpened knife, hand-sewn loafers, tender cashmere, broadcloth shirts of ineffable fineness. There’s always some cognitive dissonance in fashion—”news” happens all the time, but it’s not fashion’s job to report what happened yesterday. If the cognitive dissonance was especially keen at Pitti last week, however, that’s because it is fashion’s job to tell us about tomorrow. And no one has a clue what tomorrow will bring.
Which raises the question of relevance. How does fashion express doubt? Or flux? Or optimism clouded by fear? The work shown by most designers at Pitti begged those questions. Laura Biagotti, who relaunched her menswear label after a hiatus of more than twenty years, seems to have determined that the only thing relevant to her customers is looking nice and feeling good in their clothes. That’s fair: Looking at Biagotti’s “Napoli” jacket, petal-soft, unlined, with an easy drape, you were reminded that fashion is designed ultimately to serve a purpose, not an agenda. Ditto the wares at Comme des Garçons’ Homme Deux, which made its international debut at Pitti after several years’ incubation in Japan. Hommes Deux is all about suits—classic styles playfully reworked. Since nothing in the range is outlandish, the wit of the clothes works to create an aura of privacy around the person wearing them. A skewed lapel is not a gesture that can be appreciated from afar. Much of the super-luxurious stuff at Pitti—and there was plenty—was similarly keyed to individual experience. What can you say about one of the new, ultra-lightweight puffer jackets at Bruno Cucinelli except that they put pleasure on the body in a way Uniqlo versions of same jacket never could?
Bruno Cucinelli Puffer Jacket
Elsewhere, however, one sensed a mood of retrenchment. There seemed to be two major trends in play at Pitti—old money at the yacht club, and old money with a country pile. Now, these two trends are more meaningfully different—and differently meaningful—than they might appear at first glance. Old money at the yacht club is all about leisure—summer-weight fabrics and pastel pants and brightly colored luggage that is just mind-numbingly fine. It’s about being wealthy enough to be idle, and idle enough to be a dandy. Think Lapo Elkann. The brands that manifested this trend are either bullish about tomorrow or so bearish that they believe the only customers they’ll have in the near future are the aristos they sold to in the distant past. They are un-mainstreaming luxury.
Old money with a country pile is a more interesting case. Thom Browne was one of several designers at Pitti toying with heritage style. The folks at Gloverall, a true heritage brand, were doing the same with new versions of the classic duffer coat in colors like lemon yellow, but Browne’s puckish Fair Isle knits exemplified the way fashion can poke around in a new mood and speak back to it. Fair Isles imply a certain long-lasting utility, a work ethic, but Browne gently poked fun at that association by knitting rabbits into his sweaters and accommodating the knit to blazers and outerwear. The idea of clothes for work also showed up in Browne’s backpack coats and in woolen overalls that nodded at farm apparel then kept on going straight to town. A similar spirit showed up at Umit Benan. A Marc Jacobs alum, Benan made a forceful debut with suits of hardy plaid and tweed, which he paired with ruffled button-downs and baggy jeans, conveying winning lack of preciousness. Preciousness was also in short supply at the Social Suicide stand. Designed by Simon Waterfall and Matthew Grey, the London-based label promotes its work as “sartorial satire,” but while the brand’s Fall/Winter 09 collection of suiting inspired by dictators might suggest frivolity, the make of the clothes is dead serious. To wit: The Mao jacket, tailored to Savile Row standards and detailed with an extra button so that the collar can be closed against the wind. (”We ride Vespas,” explained Waterfall. “We get it.”) Designers like Browne, Benan, Waterfall, and Grey recognize that a moment of doubt privileges clothes that stand up to wear and tear and pass the test of time—”classics,” in a word. But these designers also understand that “classic” doesn’t have to mean “old.”
The men behind new footwear range Volta get that, too. They explicitly set out to create a “new classic”—a shoe that marries the comfort of a sneaker with the low-key serviceability of Blucher mocs or Clarks—and hit the target, dead on. And doesn’t “new classic” feels appropriate for the moment? Right for the age of Obama, right for a time that requires both innovation and a revival of the stand-up values of the past? In a way, the Volta designers show more engagement with the moment than the minds behind a brand like Dead Meat, which was shown alongside Volta in Pitti’s house for new designers, and which does reflexive social commentary rather well. But a message T-shirt is ultimately about yesterday. It’s a shout at the news. And right now, all eyes are fixed on the horizon.
Volta Footwear
KEYWORDS: Bruno Cucinelli, clothing, Comme des Garcons, fashion, Gloverall, Laura Biagotti, Pitti, Social Suicide, Thom Browne, Umit Benan, Volta
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