Listen to the audio version of the article
Knowledge as the last frontier of appearing? Fashion cannibalizes and superficializes everything, but this last prospect is really tempting. Milan men’s fashion week opened yesterday in the large porticoed courtyard of the Università Statale with the Valentino fashion show – a double return for the brand, usually present in Paris: on the calendar and with a men’s only fashion show after years of co-ed . It is not the first time that the airy and solemn spaces of the Statale have been lent to fashion, but it is perhaps one of the first in which the University understood as a center of training and knowledge accessible to all penetrates – more or less plausibly – into the story of a parade.
Valentino, the collection for SS 2024
Photogallery21 foto
View
The announcement of a donation to support scholarships for the deserving and needy – 2% of the total amount allocated by the Lombardy Region in this sense – is a sign of concreteness on the part of the maison. The invitation, a branded copy of the controversial novel A little life by Anya Yanagihara – eight hundred pages of disaster pornography in a very upper class context – is however less credible. Of course, the masculine fragility around which the writer turns with a morbid and complacent gaze is reflected in Pierpaolo Piccioli’s search for a less normative and macho masculinity, but the parallels stop there. Piccioli is not morbid. If anything, he is languid and precise. The instrument of his deconstructing stale iconography is constructive: the most classic tailoring, bent on the definition of new volumes and more liquid categories.
In men’s fashion, a few centimeters make big differences. Piccoli reduces trousers to shorts, enlarges jackets and shirts, works with compact colors and solid surfaces, and the result is an idea of a non-uniform uniform, not at all connoted in terms of gender representation. The test is as intriguing as it is monotonous, with that bit of childishness – the shorts point there – that really captures the spirit of the time. However, unhinging a code means building a new one which will then also be unhinged, in an infinite cycle called progress.
The life and identity of a brand that is over a hundred years old like Gucci is also an endless cycle. In anticipation of the debut of the new creative director, which will take place in September, occasions and outings are multiplying, because silence, today, is not even an option. A selection of looks for summer 24 – tailoring with elongated proportions, logo sportswear, printed silks, unmistakable leathers – is thus presented within an immersive installation that celebrates seventy years of the moccasin with horsebit, true icon of the brand . The past and the present in the making meet while the wait is getting shorter and the next is now ready to materialize.