Milan Fashion Week: Love with a Proper Stranger

Where is Roberto Cavalli and who is the stranger that has taken his place? If you didn't know any better, you might think that Cavalli was compressed into tiny molecular particles and placed inside a time capsule with the year 1982 stamped on it. This capsule is in the Smithsonian, under strict orders not to be opened until the year 3000. When it is eventually unlocked under the watchful gaze of dully clad anthropologists, a riddle will be solved:

So that's why Cavalli woman became extinct! Must have been one hell of a demise!

"Demise" refers to the last Cavalli collection that was truly decadent. The Big Bang collection. That occurred four years ago, and ever since then Cavalli has become, if not sensible, then comparatively sober. Fashion writers have been slow to notice this mutation, because, being human, they tend to become paralyzed at the sight of leopard. It wouldn't be truly Cavalli if the runway weren't also the veld.

Since that collection, the designer has been slowly reeling in his most extravagant tendencies. Last fall he confined the spots to workable outerwear and in the spring he abandoned Rodeo Drive. It is as if Cavalli realized that in 2004 he finally approached the boundary between ripe and rotten.

The result of this new (relative) sobriety is a Fall 2008 collection that was one third inspired by the young Natalie Wood. The other two thirds involved Peruvian Indians and c. o. d. Cavalli; one item was incomprehensible and the rest reflected the evolving leanness.

Never fear: There was still plenty to satisfy the wax figure known as Victoria Beckham.

A stranger to Cavalli might not realize that the full-blown Cavalli woman once existed in all her glorious ambrosia. She paraded around Beverly Hills with one breast exposed to the sun and the other covered in chinchilla. Wise men and history tell us that her wardrobe makes Cavalli's new collection look almost Puritanical. The episodic orgy of prime-time TV may be over, but Hollywood is still very much a part of the designer's lookbook. Time will tell whether this new script is something other than ephemera.

In the past, Cavalli painted in Dionysian oils, the thicker the better. Having switched to watercolors, the Wood-inspired dresses for fall were primly Apollonian. They were also white or pastel and styled like the underpinnings of a prom dress. This gave them an elysian perishability akin to being unable to watch Splendor in the Grass without separating Wood from the knowledge of her mortality. It also spoke volumes about the fragility of fantasy.

Overall, this part of the collection was simple but not arresting. To say it was seasonally incongruous sounds peevish. Expectation might be at fault here; when one is expecting an autumnal cliffhanger and gets instead an easy springtime ending one tends to question the price of admission.

Luxe returned, moderately, for the Peruvian-folk abstraction. Here Cavalli trimmed two coats with fur and used bright floral patterns on skirts inspired by the petticoat-like traditional polleras. Through no fault of the inspiration, a couple of pieces in this section failed to come together. A silk skirt and bodice fused onto a gray top looked like a mismatch. Balancing this misfit was a deluxe flapper dress with semi-sheer skirt and signature sternum slash.

Also part of the Incan third of the collection was a black silk dress with dropped, boxy waist. Its funereal starkness made it an odd fit. Not particularly figure-enhancing, it had a stiffness close to rectitude and yet was perhaps the part of the collection closest to a purist's bella figura, a Prada bella figura. "La bella figura" refers not just to an ideal image, but to the cultivation of manner. Arguably, the purist in Prada would be perceived as having a quieter, more refined aesthetic than the glamazon in the older Cavallis.

The collection was not meant to be unitary, although the demure Splendor in the Grass looks would have been more relevant in the spring. Why Cavalli chose to include them in the fall collection might be expressed by a quote from the writer André Breton:

"First one must love. There will always be time afterwards to analyze the reason."

Images: Style.it

Milan Fashion Week: Armani Affronted

Anyone who doubts the correlation between fashion and art need only consider that, like the artist, the fashion designer is largely considered to be only as good as his last collection. If said designer is a tyro with only a season or two under his belt, the correlation becomes all the clearer. The sophomore book was a disappointment, the second role was a bust, the latest album was not as good as the first.

Or so the song goes. It's a tough world out there.

Even the artist in his prime can suffer a reactive disappointment, and disappointment may sow the seeds of doubt in the mind of the critic (we cannot speak for the artist, who we hope possesses a large enough ego to overlook a cavil or two).

Ego is sometimes as unpredictable as an act of God.

Giorgio Armani is an artist in his prime and in the prime of his ego. Back in 2005, he threw a clinker of a collection that was based on bloomers. Bloomers did not change either the fashion industry or the way women dressed, and because of the designer's track record he was treated gently and respectfully by the media. He did not receive, as a freshman designer might, a critical walloping. Women did not respond well to the pantaloons, no matter how well tailored, and the moment became a minor blip in fashion history that passed without causing psychic injury.

Armani returned to form the following season with a collection that he predicated upon what women really want, i. e. not satin diapers. The critics breathed a sigh of relief at this careful backtracking; he is taking our needs into account after a brief and thankfully temporary period of delusion. This is the Armani we know and love. They still politely wondered if he would ever break out of his smartly tailored jacket.

In a three-week-old review of the designer's couture collection, Cathy Horyn of The New York Times referred to that signature piece as a "huge beige hub" and remarked that she doubted whether "a jewel of a dress" would ever emerge from within it. She went on to say that Mr. Armani, unlike Mr. Lagerfeld, had a diminished ability to use his own history or wit as a reference point or to create sui generis garments. In order to produce such a masterpiece, she felt, Mr. Armani would need both irony and self-reference, neither of which was in the range of his "imagination." She said that his body of work had been "impeccable."

Mr. Armani, via his head of communications, not so promptly uninvited Ms. Horyn from his Autumn 2008 ready-to-wear show on the morning of the show. The rescindment took the form of an e-mail, supposedly reinforcing the contents of an earlier letter that Ms. Horyn did not receive. Mr. Armani, the e-mail said, had not cared for the "tone" Ms. Horyn had used to describe his friends and family as they waited for the start of the January haute couture show. Ms. Horyn's tone had been "belittling" and Ms. Horyn need not darken the ready-to-wear doorway with her presence.

For those of you who do not read Ms. Horyn's column, the article stated, "Sophia Lauren, dressed in a dark coat and trousers, sat in the front row. There was no need to smile because Sophia Loren had smiled so many times before. Mr. Armani’s niece, Roberta, sat next to Hilary Swank, who had on a black beaded cocktail dress. Ms. Armani never seemed to stop smiling.

The burlesque star Dita Von Teese, who had changed from a Dior in the afternoon to an Armani, its portrait neckline now framing her bosom, sat very still, her hands folded on her lap, the picture of a lady in drag."

It could well be that the burlesque star objected to having her appearance associated with transvestism, especially when wearing one of Mr. Armani's own garments. Mr. Armani might have balked similarly. Neither Mr. Armani's niece nor Ms. Loren seemed to have grounds for complaint, but you never know. These are sensitive times.

It seems more likely that the real reason for the retraction was that the designer perceived Ms. Horyn's remark about his apparent inability to produce a magnum opus as damning. That may have been what was truly "belittling," and Armani may have felt it discredited a designer with a prolific and commercially successful body of work. To dissemble and use a sophistic reason for the rescindment was preferable to acknowledging the existence of the statement and ergo admitting that it had an impact. By easing around its gravitas, the statement became distant and less alive. Still, it's the designer version of the actor who will never win an Oscar, the writer who will never win the Pulitzer, and the singer who will not cart home a Grammy. Ever.

You can see how quickly such a thing might get out of hand, even if it won't approach the hostility of the Capulet-Montague feud. Was Ms. Horyn throwing down a gauntlet or was her statement an absolute? What of Armani's enormous body of work; was all of this not up to snuff? Was Ms. Horyn saying that he had never once produced "a jewel"? What about all those Armanis that have paraded down red carpets on the backs of Hollywood's shiniest stars, were these simply "impeccable" shmattes?

Whatever the real reason for the e-mail, it read as a self-conscious and puny one. It lacked, as the Italians say, coglioni, and there was Ms. Horyn busting what was left of them in an On the Runway blog post.

It may have looked like an antique comedy of errors, but it was a modern conundrum with modern implications.

Language is a funny thing, especially today. No sooner does one manage to extricate one's foot from one's mouth then someone else forces it back in there. It happens with increasing inadvertence as the world grows smaller, and as a result of this shrinkage there are innumerable fresh opportunities to offend. Journalists--and especially those who collate letters to editors--know that if someone can take umbrage, he will. There is always someone to rile. That person might live in a remote corner of the Idaho Panhandle, but he's out there. There is a giant computer in Belgium that stores all of our choicest and not-so-select words and keeps a running tab, so watch it, buddy.

We've now worked ourselves into a tight little knot that requires a communication protocol. We must stick to the simplest language; words that are in the vernacular suddenly have significance well outside our ken. We are all arrivistes on the new linguistic frontier. Simple literacy is no longer enough--if by literacy we mean that one knows when it is necessary to seek information, where one might find correct information, and how one must properly use that information.

All of this takes place before expression, before considering tone, before wondering about what goes on in someone else's head. If you're feeling somewhat less than creative, you are on the right track. You may now call yourself, until tomorrow, a responsible writer.

By the looks of it we are going to have to write with a very cramped pen.

And that ready-to-wear collection? Armani redux, with a bit of social reflux. Always true to itself in its fashion.

Milan Fashion Week: Molto Topolino

There are a couple of things you can say about certain collections at Milan Fashion Week, and one of those is: Che macello! This is the knee-jerk statement that arises from being exposed to the fashion equivalent of a cartoon slaughterhouse. All that gaudiness! That hair! Donatella!

The other is a narrow defense of Milan as culturally correct response to the saturnalia of Paris, to the sclerotic indie cred of London, and to New York as a hidebound gauge of commercialism. Poor New York; imagine being seen to openly troll for customers. The fact that Milan seems in part disconnected to the other three can be explained by philosophical stereotype: The Italians know being from existing. In other words, they know how to live with gusto. They have appetites and they indulge their rights to abuse bronzer.

Gross generalization aside, these are the people responsible for the comic minion Arlecchino and the Commedia dell'Arte, and what is that but improv theatre in its most enjoyably unsubtle form?

Comedy in whatever form is a matter of national pride, even as it crosses not the Tiber but the Rubicon.

So it's the Italians--or the Frankie Morello designers in particular--who make liberal use of epic and ad hoc comic simile while the rest of the world gets bogged down by pedantic discussions of the global fashion marketplace and one's obligations to its needs.

As the Frankie Morello collection proves, sometimes it's about having a good time in bad taste instead of the other way around. Morello makes Paris look depraved, London look arthritic, and New York look anxious. In all cases, the rest of the world seems unhealthy and far too serious. Who wants clothes that are manifestations of neuroses?

The Morello romp included eleven giant mouse-eared bows, some more literal than others; three bellboy caps; three sets of plastic google eyes either worn sensibly on the front of one of the bellboy caps or more incongruously at the waist. Plus transparent skirts, a sheath silk-screened with what appeared to be three quarters of Madonna's face, and a chic but inexpensive-looking collarless tweed suit with fake fur cuffs.

Besides Madonna, Maurizio Modica and Pierfrancesco Gigliotti took this opportunity to introduce the world to the rest of their imaginary pals. For Autumn/Winter 2008-09, these buddies included Mickey Mouse, Felix the Cat, Séverine Serizy, and Wham!

Wham!? Amen to that, sister. Pop culture has always been a slumgullion of disconnected idiom. In instances like these, where many of its brightest symbols seem to be disgorged at once, it feels both nauseating and liberating. The former occurs only if one allows oneself to get personally involved or to be preoccupied with intellect. The point is that there is no point. Scholars have wasted years on presumptive debate and other academic errata when there may have been nothing to evaluate in the first place. Frankie Morello does away with this nuisance speculation in a torrent of Belle de Jour hair, fake fur, and a peppy FRANK! emblazoned across another of the caps.

Culture here does not mean sophistication or anything remotely close to it. The Italians have always loved Topolino, Madonna, and evidently Wham! as well. The only people who will be upset are those who suffer fashion instead of suffering for it. The first of these two unrelated anxiety disorders is beyond the scope of the Morello aesthetic.

It might be prudent to view the Frankie Morello label as a nostrum whose purpose it is to relieve intellectual bloat, like a psychedelic antacid.

Mixing international kitsch from the Big Eighties with Kellogg's Americana from the 60's , the dynamic duo refuted the idea that fashion has to have purpose. Sometimes, all it needs is pop. And maybe a little snap and crackle.