Models were dancing. Also.
Here, during the first weekend of men's fall shows, quite a few fashion houses decided that simply showing off new clothes was not enough. No, the audience should see Alvin Ailey perform. The runway show has ended. A free jazz dance recital will be held.
At Brioni on Saturday, designer Norbert Stampfl will be showing off his 1 Percent Signifier collection (crocodile coats, vicuña jackets, and devil-may-care-style cashmere sweaters looped over jackets). He paused the walkthrough and let me take a look. The rotating style of the dancer. For several minutes, a man wiggled around on the red carpet. He swung his coat around like a caped bullfighter and seemed to say: No lining! ”
A few hours later, at a presentation at Cornelliani, more dancers, wearing marble-gray sweaters and slate suits, ran along a rotating platform in a pseudo-breakdance routine. They paused between slides to embrace it.
“I think male dancers are very emotional,” said Stefano Gaudioso Tramonte, the label's style director.
As well as providing Instagram-worthy drama, the performance, choreographed by Kate Coyne, artistic director of London's Central School of Ballet, showed that the label's pressed pants and flatsuits aren't as restrictive as they seem. It was expressing.
“We wanted to show that the fabrics are all very precise, but also very fluid,” Guadioso Tramonte said.
The fledgling label Mordecai didn't need a dance routine to show that its clothes were fluid. That was evident in the slouchy look of Abominable Snowman hoodies and loose striped pants draped over models at Saturday afternoon's presentation. Yet label founder and designer Ludovico Bruno breathed life into static models, bending and stomping like monks listening to Kraftwerk.
“This is not a dance class, it's more like a wave,” Bruno said.
Movement has long been part of fashion presentation. In the 1990s, models strutted down the catwalks and survived. (For footage of that, watch the powerful fashion documentary “Unzipped” about Isaac Mizrahi.) To this day, brands like Issey Miyake still employ dance troops to wiggle down the runway and make their clothes supple. I'm emphasizing.
That dance has become such a common motif in Milan speaks to the nature of the brands operating here. Many of them are traditionalists, and their collections change little from season to season. To the unscrupulous eye, the dance routine distracts the audience from this fact. Of course, a more benign view would be that the routine shows elegance and grace in clothing.
Of course, social media is also involved. Every performance I witnessed this weekend was viewed by an audience with iPhones in hand. I was able to see it all later on Instagram. What about smart free marketing?
Labels like Mordecai represent Milan's other faction, albeit on a smaller scale. It's a young company that probably doesn't have the confidence to take the runway yet, but hasn't succumbed to the static, “so-and-so” vibe of the showroom for starters. , it looks like a well-stocked retail store.
They should be leaping towards the runway instead of choreographed and half-measured. After all, the fashion week audience is better at judging topcoats than two-steps.
