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Talking about cyclicality, in matters of dominant aesthetics, is as obvious as it is necessary. Schematizing reduces the vitality of facts and fashions to a bloodless diagram, but it is also true that the alternations are tangible, therefore real. The long wave of blatant excesses in favor of social media – huge logos, unbridled but inconclusive gender-bending, theatricalisation of everyday life – has finally broken against a sudden desire for simplicity. It is no coincidence that since luxury was sensational, in a fashion sense, it now recalls the adjective quiet. If it’s not a penitenziagite (an abbreviation in the vernacular of the Latin phrase poenitentiam àgite, do penance), we’re close there. These are clean-ups, good and bad.
The calendar of Milan fashion week shows for spring-summer 2024 actually opened yesterday (Tuesday had been reserved for events dedicated above all to young designers) in the name of a subtractive movement, of a search for purity, which everything at first is calming. In the long run, of course, it could become boring: the simple, if handled badly, risks becoming boring or ordinary.
Fendi, the collection for SS 2024
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At Fendi, absolute sobriety has something, let’s use the oxymoron, of joyfully mournful quality. Artfully wrapped in sheath dresses and sweaters that reveal portions of skin, wrapped in blazers and aerial dusters, the women imagined by creative director Kim Jones, announced as free and Roman, appear cheerful beguines with orange gloves and acrylic flashes that illuminate the pale grays and defeatists, the pointed shoes, the proudly exhibitionist bags. The precision and subtlety of the chromatic sense are appreciated, but the Capitoline exuberance which is a substantial trait of Fendi’s DNA seems once again absent.
Alberta Ferretti, who, it must be said, has never been prone to excess, simplifies and lightens by starting from the metaphorical white canvas of the men’s shirt, from the stripes that run through it, from the cotton poplin that symbolizes it. The show opens pragmatically and masculine, without frills but with a lot of grace, and gradually becomes more airy, draped, impalpable, but losing simplicity.
Eternal herald of a truly Italian, or rather Neapolitan, carnality – neorealist, dining room rather than dramatic, and therefore intense, powerful – from N°21, the brand of the designer Alessandro Dell’Acqua, he plays with the dualism of Naples, with the its weddings and communions, the aristocracy, the rough streets. It is a pattern on flat shoes that seduces: although full of Pradesque echoes, it has a personal touch.