Fashion criticism, if you have the privilege of doing it, is a pretty interesting practice. It puts you in constant contact with creativity and beauty. It allows you to think and write about the ways in which what humans choose to wear on their bodies affects almost everything about how we move through social and cultural space. Many times it is fun.
However, there is a flaw in the process and that is that, unlike those who write about art, music, dance, architecture and, especially, food, fashion critics approach their subjects with an unfortunate distance. We look at clothes all the time, and yet we rarely experience them as their creators intended. We don't use them.
Thinking about this during the Milan menswear shows, I decided to view the collections less as a critic and more as a consumer, allowing myself to respond emotionally to individual looks, to imagine owning them. In short, I went shopping. This, then, is not a strict review but rather a somewhat random list of things I bought for my fantasy wardrobe.
Let's start with Prada and a loose, loose charcoal wool coat designed to be worn over faded jeans with a faded denim shirt and, from what I could make out, an equally faded blue tie. The look was an apotheosic Canadian tuxedo (with apologies to Canada), and this reviewer loved it right away. Add to cart, accept all cookies.
In fendi, there was apparently so much to covet on first viewing that I quickly found myself filling a mental shopping bin. Then, when I went back through my hoards, I experienced that change of heart familiar to anyone who has ever raved at a sample sale. Gone were the seemingly cool replicas of LL Bean's classic camp moccasins which, upon closer examination, turned out to be made of leather stamped to look like an alligator. Gone are the barn-style coats with exotic fabrications because, after all, what's wrong with the barn coat I bought at Tractor Supply? Gone is the chocolate-colored leather coat with zippers and snaps that opened the show because, honestly, it probably costs as much as a second-hand car.
I could easily imagine myself wearing that elegant, baggy gray wool coat with dropped shoulders and elongated leather buttons, but even in fantasy, that's also beyond my pay grade. However, I imagined I bought a Fendi wool hunter hat to go with it.
From his distant days designing at Prada, Neil Barrett He has been a king of coat. I defy anyone (man or woman) to walk out of a Barrett show without hankering for some outerwear. This season, for this viewer, it was a toss-up between a jacket with bracelet-length sleeves over a grape-colored T-shirt and pants and a heavy wool bomber jacket with curious vertical zippered pockets near the armhole and designed to be worn with gloves. perverted leather straps held over the knuckles. Channeling my inner Peter Marino, I chose the attacker.
In Zegna, there were plenty of things to admire and covet, the brand's creative director Alessandro Sartori, as usual, showed off plenty of layered and blocky clothing created with obscure industrial salvage techniques. Take, for example, the oversized wool sweater the color of an olive martini or a set of wide-cut charcoal pants paired with a medium gray sweater and a gray mandarin collar jacket buttoned only at the top.
While I liked each one objectively, what I acquired mentally was not anything from the show but the suit Mr. Sartori wore to take his bow. A black zip-up bomber jacket, which stylist Julie Ragolia layered over charcoal wool pants, a dark turtleneck, and sturdy black double-soled pumps. The moment Mr. Sartori hit the runway, I clicked and added his look to my basket.
In Armani, the designer typically takes his bow in a black T-shirt and dark pants meant to show off a physique that's still quite muscular for a 90-year-old man. There were a whopping 82 looks at the Armani show, and while I longed for a number Ultimately, it came down to choosing between a practical eight-button, dropped-shoulder wool stadium coat that would last for years or an ensemble that, in pure fashion, it is called a heroic piece. The second was a black velvet coat with a snap closure and it was something that in no universe except a fantasy one would I ever wear. Since Fantasyland is where I was shopping, I chose that.
By the same process of illogic, I inspected all the perverted things in the JW Anderson show (inspired, Jonathan Anderson said, by the Stanley Kubrick film “Eyes Wide Shut”), temporarily quelling any misgivings I may have about being that guy in a wool sheath dress knitted with images of cats or ruffled panties from Puffy satin or used pantyhose. under oversized sweaters. In the end I went back to conventional and selected an inky black belted wool coat with an exaggerated collar and super long sleeves that reminded me of a cosplay set in which I played Benedict Cumberbatch playing Sherlock Holmes.
And finally, more soberly, in a tod's During the presentation, staged like a tableau vivant in a pavilion on the grounds of the glorious, modernist Villa Necchi Campiglio, I examined a collection created by an in-house team. As sometimes happens when the designer's ego is put aside, everything on display was free of guile and therefore elegant and anonymously refined. It turned out that a zippered denim biker jacket was made of feather-light wool. The subtly ornamental stripes on the sweaters were actually leather laces. A boxy jacket so basic it barely registered as a design was inspired, I later learned, by one worn by Italian architect and design deity Gio Ponti. And the shoes that looked like Clarks Wallabees looked so wonderful at Shoe Barn that you'd hardly associate them with a luxury goods house until you saw the price tag.
We know that money is not a problem when you buy in your dreams. Naturally I bought the entire collection.
