Last Saturday, in a former 1940s movie theatre in Milan, music soared, a carnival of lights blazed and male models walked out in glittery, glitzy clothes designed by Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana. It seemed like business as usual for Milan’s spring/summer 2022 menswear shows. Only, of course, it wasn’t. The audience was masked like a fancily attired surgeons’ convention, spaced a metre apart and about half its usual size, as many from the US, UK and Asia did not travel.
The pandemic may be subsiding across Europe but this menswear week was still a small and subdued affair. Only three major brands held physical shows: Dolce & Gabbana, Etro and, for the first time since February 2020, Armani. A few dozen others continued to show digitally, often mixed with events in real life, or IRL as the kids would say. And youth was a focus of many of these offerings, engineered it seemed to satisfy Gen Z. Now some 2.5bn people — the largest portion of the global population — Gen Z has the fastest-growing income, according to Euromonitor, one projected to reach $33tn by 2030.
The past year or so has demonstrated the resilience of the luxury industry as a whole: In the first quarter of 2021, Kering’s revenues rose to pre-pandemic levels, while LVMH turnover increased 32 per cent compared with the same period in 2020, almost double analysts’ expectations. Designers seem to be banking on young consumers powering continued growth: the clothes proposed by Fendi, Prada and Dolce & Gabbana — and, to a lesser extent, Alessandro Sartori at Ermenegildo Zegna — skewed decidedly younger. The results, creatively, seem mixed.
Dolce & Gabbana looked back to early 2000s fashion — they even wrote “2000s Fashion Moment” on a T-shirt. It’s a growing revival other brands have already capitalised on: Prada’s version of a 2005 bag has proved a runaway hit, one of the most searched-for styles of 2021, according to online aggregator Lyst.
Dolce & Gabbana re-examined their own millennial taste for bling, rigging their show out with the flashy luminarie lights common to festivities in Italy’s south (think Blackpool, with better weather) and crystal-encrusting everything that moved. The result was Elvis in his much-imitated Nudie-suited heyday, with a J-Lo chaser. But jewelled denim jeans with plain white T-shirts — and black fishnet sweaters and cardigans — looked oddly palatable, with a tongue firmly planted in the cheek. Sometimes old can feel new.
Other times, not so much — Etro was retro, a drippy hippy show of metallic hip-huggers and louche blouses that would appeal to ageing Boomer rockers rather than their grandkids. But the show was pleasantly staged outside in a disused Milanese train station, audience mask-free but socially distanced. The experience seemed fresh as a result, even if the clothes did not.
Conversely, Prada combined catwalk and on-location imagery in a superb, attention-grabbing digital film that depicted models striding through a narrow red tunnel before magically transporting to the wide panorama of a Sardinian beach. Prada has seized on the few opportunities paradoxically offered by the restrictions of Covid-19 to communicate to new audiences through digital, and its ecommerce sales increased 200 per cent in 2020.
This collection was easy to love, with a naive and playful happiness. “An innocence,” Miuccia Prada said. “When times are complicated, we are searching for simple, direct joys.”
And the clothes were joyous, full of pattern and colour (red and green and a great zinging oil-slicker yellow leather coat), shorts cropped high on the leg to expose the body to the elements. Exposure of skin, incidentally, is a trend: that makes sense in summer but also feels geared, again, to a younger generation happy to flash their flesh.
Fendi also ramped up the body-consciousness, with Silvia Venturini Fendi slicing up otherwise conservative tailoring to expose acres of midriff and thigh. The accessories — the baguette bag sized up as a messenger or rendered in Perspex — were strong, the colour palette soft.
Pastels dominated Milan as a whole — I have never seen quite so many pink and lilac shoes for men. Alessandro Sartori used especially sweet shades in Ermenegildo Zegna’s video presentation — baby blue, pink, peppermint, buttermilk, in head-to-toe tonals that socked a major impact.
Sartori is a designer who seems to have been focused by the pandemic, taking chances such as Pepto-Bismol pink pyjamas in lightly padded silk, which looked unexpectedly great. Breaking free of the hegemony of the ultra-trad suit — an act that isn’t one of mere designer defiance but of listening to what his consumers want to purchase — Sartori’s Zegna now feels like a strong, fully rounded proposal, with a true identity.
A strong identity describes Giorgio Armani. His return to a real show was significant, because Armani is a celebrity worldwide and a superstar in Italy: the street outside his show was thronged with Gen Z and even younger.
He staged it small-scale, in the company headquarters where his private apartment is, and where he used to present his collections a couple of decades ago, in a kind of homecoming. After the show, Armani gathered the press in his back garden — in a gazebo, only about 20 of us — and explained that he had recently fallen and been hospitalised, as breathlessly reported in the Italian press.
He tugged up a sleeve and showed us 17 stitches across his arm, but said he was fine and still managed a 77-look collection. “With men, you can’t have too much fun,” he said of the collection, which was serious if not sombre, with his understated, relaxed tailoring in linens. That was created to the template of his work in the 1970s, when he revolutionised suiting — and laid the groundwork for the casual experimentation and evolutions still happening today.
But at the end of his typically quiet and understated show, he showed four masked models, the only ones of the week. “It’s a reminder to still be careful, it’s not over,” Armani said, sagely. “Don’t get excited.” Perhaps a salient message to the entire industry.
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