Squeezed between Pitti Uomo and the Paris fashion week, the Milan men’s fashion week has been condemned for years to a progressive reduction of its calendar, with both Italian and internationally renowned designers who end up preferring Paris or other contexts, even Florence itself.
Nevertheless, what we found in this last fashion week – now reduced to (almost) three days – it is a ferment that comes from below, especially from young independent designers.
Led by Francesco Ragazzi (Palm Angels) and the duo composed of Simone Rizzo and Loris Messina (Sunnei), these new talents are in fact rewriting the imaginary of men’s fashion in the only Italian city that is legitimately taking on a key role in Europe.
The positive constant seems to be that of a scene that tries to express a vision of the world in different ways
starting from Bianco Sunnei’s project, going to the sophisticated presentation of Danilo Paura, without overlooking the atmosphere of a fashionable mysticism of M1992.
It is an attempt to restore culture foundations from two assumptions drawing consciously and respectfully both from art and tailoring tradition, after decades of hedonism and business. The first assumption is that street-culture and street-style need a tradition to interact with and to get contaminated with, in order to produce new forms of significance and involvement. Secondly, after the hangover of the normcore, it is time to imagine new dynamics of harmony and elegance.
Projects such as the collaboration between La Martina and Andrea Pompilio as well as the research paths of Les Hommes, BED j.w. FORD and Numero 00 seem to respond to these signals. Thanks to the lesson that has come from the street, a new form of fashion is emerging and looking at tailoring tradition with renewed interest, contaminating it with codes that are alien to it, for bringing new scenarios to life.
To achieve this, the new vanguard of designers is in fact gathering multiple forms of expression and different languages, from art to cinema, through the inevitable musical influence. The results are a fascinating melting-pot and blaze of possibilities that we hope will be as unpredictable as they might be imaginative. Because the future cannot be built. It needs to be imagined.
