Standout shows from Bally and Bottega Veneta bring Milan Fashion Week to a close. Gucci, Versace and Moschino do some recycling.
And thus began the season of the weird. After decades in which clothes that telegraphed sex or stealth wealth dominated the Milanese runways, it’s the stranger things that seem the most on target now.
“There’s a feeling that anything could happen, no matter how fantastical,” Matthieu Blazy wrote in his Bottega Veneta show notes, before seating his audience on low-slung leather bean bags in animal shapes — Jacob Elordi plopped down onto a bunny, Michelle Yeoh onto a ladybug. It turned a cavernous warehouse into a fun house and forced every guest to adopt an alternate perspective.
“Well, it’s kind of an irrational time,” Simone Bellotti said in something of an understatement backstage after his brilliant Bally show, inspired by the German Dadaist Hugo Ball.
Indeed, the most eye-catching appearance of the week was not, as it turned out, Mr. Elordi or Jin of BTS taking a post-military service front-row seat at Gucci, but Cheryl Hines, the actress-wife of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She showed up at Bally just after the news broke about her husband’s sexting relationship with a political reporter. (Apparently Ms. Hines is friends with the brand’s new owner, Michael Reinstein of the global private equity firm Regent.) And the best casting was not Cavalli’s supermodel reunion but Sunnei’s embrace of 70- and 80-something models in its 10th-anniversary meditation on time. As opposed to that old fashion shibboleth, timelessness.
You can either retreat into the safety of the elegant chocolate suit (for that, go to MaxMara), the always-appropriate leather trench (at Tod’s, Matteo Tamburini did it best) or you can take the confounding, bizarro nature of this global moment and turn it into a look. The best shows in Milan did.
A Breakthrough and a Blast
Mr. Bellotti, for example, did it in his third Bally show, the rare Milan collection to really explore the allure of a new silhouette, one that both evoked the looming fear of the unknown and offered a carapace to match.
Inspired by a sloping iron cape he found in a photo of Mr. Ball in his Dada heyday, Mr. Bellotti raised necklines and sloped shoulders. Rounded blouson jackets mimicked mountainous boulders and skirts were shaped à la cowbell, so they curved out at the hips and in at the thigh. Some peplums were so aggressively structured, they jutted out like horns from floral frocks or from under neat jackets. Or like the metal spikes on the Mary Jane shoes beneath, which referenced both Alpine climbers and punks and were based on a shoe Bally first made in 1945, in the shadow of World War II. Coincidence? Nah. More like a uniquely trenchant remix.
Just as Mr. Blazy’s through-the-looking-glass games at Bottega Veneta, in a show that evoked childhood’s reality distortion field, offered an unexpectedly uplifting outlet. Imagine pleated or pinstripe pantaskirts. (Wait — pantaskirts? What even is that? I’ll tell you: wrap or asymmetric skirts with one pant leg emerging from beneath.) As if someone got stuck in the midst of trying on two different pieces and decided to just go with both. The style offers one way to put your foot in it, anyway.
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