How sad is Milan that parades in the sultry courtyards

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Simon Cracker

Brunello Cucinelli

Brunello Cucinelli

Emporio Armani

Emporio Armani

Giorgio Armani

Kiton

Mordecai

Prada

Prada

Flowers

There is a noun that fashionistas love very much, and it is “energy”. Having energy, expressing “a beautiful energy”, is the contemporary equivalent of the coolness of the past. Well, energy has disappeared from fashion, unless you want to confuse it with nervousness . Despite the fact that at the Pitti press conference, the president of ICE Matteo Zoppas had provided encouraging data for men's fashion and the press release closing the event had provided a moderately positive summary, a gloomy air hovered over the three and a half days of men's fashion shows in Milan that, net of the very high temperatures, inevitable in an increasingly cemented city, nothing managed to dispel; not even the parties, the celebrations, the gardens and the large spaces set up like amusement villages.

In Florence, perhaps because of the beauty of the city, the many young people presented with special initiatives, the dinners overlooking Santa Maria del Fiore and the concerts of the Cuoio di Toscana consortium, now in its fortieth year and with a new collaboration with Diego Dolcini under its belt, in the park of the Four Seasons which was Palazzo Della Gherardesca and therefore remains very cool even at forty degrees, the fact that the climate is increasingly heavy and the money is increasingly less has been relatively little noticed. Seeing the superintendent of the Maggio Musicale Carlo Fuortes photographing the beautiful parade by Niccolò Pasqualetti organized in the cavea of ​​the theater, enthusiastic despite the blazing sun and the wicked idea of ​​placing reflective mats on the concrete, inspired many cheerful thoughts on the opportunities for artistic overlapping, which music and costume have always practiced.

In Milan, the fact that turnover has in many cases halved and I will write about it in a few lines, has instead been evident also because of that aesthetic choice of “contemporaneity” , another essential term of the trendy fashionista, which has brought the few independent or alternative fashion shows to crumbling courtyards, semi-abandoned courtyards, suffocating garages, sidewalks tout court, with passers-by arranged in a circle beyond the barriers because in supposedly inclusive times contemporary fashion, having finished the usual stop in front of the photographer, goes out into the street, “mingles”. I would like to say that it worked and that even the co-ed fashion shows (men-women, sometimes impossible to distinguish) made sense and instead the atmosphere didn't help them, and you could already tell a little from the debut, the Fiorucci fashion show with the gaunt faces of the models, the hideous little stuffed dog in their arms and those leggings in fluorescent colors that in the days of the founder, Elio, and the "disco" Seventies, were sexy as hell because the girls were beautiful and shapely, and now they are disturbing either because of the girls' protruding iliac crests, or because they don't correspond in the slightest to the reality of everyday life, or rather of contemporary life: compared to the young women of that time, those we see on the street now have an average of ten, fifteen kilos more, due to terrible diet and no sport, which require a different fashion. While it makes perfect sense for today's 18-20 year olds with spending power to flock to Vivienne Westwood boutiques in search of corsets, as has been happening for some time now, I don't see them slipping into the unstructured, flesh-colored tulle bodysuit that opened the show or spending two hundred euros on a cloud-print T-shirt, not to mention those of us who spent our first allowance in 1976 on a turquoise belt in Galleria Passarella, appreciating Fiorucci's ironic approach and democratic prices above all, and today we find neither of those things: neither the affordable prices nor, much less, the irony.

So, the cumulative effect of the concrete, the heat, the chipped walls, the sad faces, the visibly unsuccessful and presumably expensive clothes – leaving all that space to Raf Simons' "free" aesthetic, to the trio of square shirts, changing the ciripà model, socks on bare legs, did not benefit the Prada collection, I say this for (almost) everyone because the comments on the release of the collection, a few hours before CEO Gianfranco D'Attis resigned, were stinging even from those who, for the sake of a quiet life, limited themselves to the news – took away what little energy remained . Comparing the calendar of Milanese fashion shows from three years ago with that of this edition is the most effective demonstration of the selection process underway at every level . Excluding Zegna, who, for obvious market reasons, presented the collection in Dubai, luckily for them a few days before the Iranian regime under attack considered closing the Strait of Hormuz, the list is missing Fendi, Versace, Jil Sander, John Richmond who returned to present in London despite the calendar having been reset, and then Gucci , who presented a co-ed collection last February, but could have done a small reminder these days and instead, like everyone who can, is organizing the presentation of the jewels in Paris, during the haute couture fashion shows which, keep this in mind because that's where we're going back and I've been writing this for two years, will be crowded like never before: large or small, the maison de couture has even become, and not infrequently, competitive with high-end pret-à-porter, with the difference that it is made to measure.

Antonio Grimaldi has never worked as hard as he has in the last year, like Fausto Puglisi with the Cavalli special orders or Massimo Monteforte who struggles to satisfy the requests of ladies who don't understand why they have to put themselves in standard models at tailor-made prices, no longer considering the brand a decisive value. Many other brands have opted for the presentation and have done very well, see Bally which, one of the new managers told me, with certainly creative fashion shows, but also with continuous distancing from what is generically defined as core business and which in this specific case means shoes for an aspirational bourgeois public, has halved its turnover in three years: immediately after the pandemic, it sold for 400 million, today it has a turnover of around 200 million and while its creative director Simone Bellotti has moved on to Jil Sander, he is laboriously trying to reposition himself with sport and more precisely with tennis , which in the wake of Jannik Sinner's success everyone seems to have rediscovered after years of oblivion and here we must give credit to Gucci for having seen far with the boy who now sings, or rather acts, with Andrea Bocelli in one of the hits of the summer.

On the red clay, albeit fake, that is, reconstructed in the greenhouse of Villa Necchi Campiglio, Tod's has positioned its identity rubbers, but something unpleasant must be going on between the brand and its creative director Matteo Tamburini, who held a White House-style press conference, that is, reading a press release that was passed to him, answered a question by rereading a sentence from the same press release and left the meeting essentially without saying goodbye to anyone. It's amazing how he hadn't heard that, as good as he may be and he certainly is, in the Tod's group there is only one creative director who answers to the name of Diego Della Valle and who has always considered the fashion collections an excellent marketing tool at the service of the core business, that is, the rubber on which it has based its fortune for forty-odd years, but it is clear that at this point, that is, after a year and a half of collections that no one has seen in stores, Tamburini has to do some thinking and understand what his goals are because, once you've passed adolescence, you learn to manage your nerves. Him, like many others. If once upon a time, that is, when fashion was growing at double digits, creative directors could be venerated and idolized and pampered and at most interacted with the merchandising director, now that things are going rather badly for almost everyone, the creators of collections are forced to deal with people who would open a stall at the Monday market in Piazza San Marco if this could help them maintain the sales budgets promised to shareholders and guarantee themselves the end-of-year bonus, and in fact lately they tend to do just that. At Etro, for example, the collection was so openly “commercial” , the paisley print stamped on the ties so cheap, I hate to use such a brutal adjective but it's the right one, that its creative director, Marco De Vincenzo, preferred to spend the weekend with his family, in Sicily. I don't know if the presence of L Catterton in both Tod's and Etro's capital has anything to do with these displays of impatience; What is certain is that the reactions of the creative departments to the pressures of the last year are an incontrovertible and substantially identical fact, as are the increasingly diluted and feeble attempts to make use of the so-called "brand heritage", that is, the archives.

Take for example and once again the Bally case; for some time now, the brand has occupied the glorious spaces where between the 1990s and the early 2000s Tom Ford galvanized audiences of both sexes with the best Gucci ever. Just to make it clear that in Italy we do not only have problems with “The Leopard” by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa that high school graduates have not read or even seen in the tacky adaptation on Netflix, but with many other aspects of mass culture, no one - absolutely no one - among the young people who work at Bally knows the history of the space where they present shoes and jackets, not to mention that of the building that houses it, that is, the glorious Belle Epoque building where at the beginning of the 20th century the “Diana baths” opened, including a hotel and spa. You understand well that if you ignore without problems the architectural, symbolic, historical aspects of the place where you work, selling image and beauty becomes difficult even if you have memorized all the clichés of the moment and offer the best Campari in the area.

Fortunately, however, beyond this difficult moment embodied by the dull face of Carla Bruni singing with her little voice a hundred meters from where, once, she walked the catwalks as a queen, there is also something that works . Not a little, after all, and the good news is that it is mostly young people: the guys from the Simon Cracker brand, for example, that is Filippo Biraghi and Simone Botte , who intercept a taste and a style easily recognizable with their stratified yet unornamented forms and who, like many others, have found a welcoming place to parade practically pro bono at the Sozzani Foundation (you'll see that, having overcome troubles and worries and with the support of her daughter Sara Maino, an important talent scout, Carla Sozzani will be able to best affirm that strip of Milanese suburb called Bovisasca and gentrify it as she did thirty years ago with Corso Como). Or, again, Mordecai, the brand name of the Ludovico Bruno line , with its fluid and powerful fashion, the large shapes, the raw materials that are a bit of a trend for next season and that can also be found in the collections of two brands that might seem very far from this one, namely Kiton with its beautiful heavy and colorful linens in orange and ultramarine blue and Brunello Cucinelli with the sand and infinite shades of gray that are now his signature and that have also expanded to the new eyewear collections developed with Essilor Luxottica . But what is truly astonishing is the possible, hypothetical overlap between a brand like Mordecai and one like Emporio Armani , among the most appreciated in absolute terms. To think that a thirty-eight-year-old and a gentleman who is almost ninety-one (who, yes, has not been well but is recovering at home and in the meantime has had the opportunity to observe both fashion shows and guide them via FaceTime and even call us to order because we were delaying the start of the show and there were tens of thousands of people connected) see things in a not too dissimilar way and that they dress today's man with the same loose linen trousers with a low crotch, the wide shirts, the small elegant tie prints, the jacquards, the "comforting" shapes, which give serenity, has something comforting even in those who, by profession, limit themselves to observing.