Fast and slow, Milan designers experimented with pacing for next fall and winter, many falling on deliberate and somber collections with a focus on a tailored silhouette.
Some scenes from Saturday's shows on the second day of Milan Fashion Week of mostly menswear previews for Fall-Winter 2024-25:
DOLCE&GABBANA SETS A ROMANTIC PACE
Dolce&Gabbana slowed to a romantic pace in a new collection featuring richly elegant looks fit for a period drama.
Designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana revamped the showroom since last season, opening up a double stairway in the middle of the runway allowing models a dramatic entrance from below.
The predominant deep night black color palette for the next fall and winter heightened the textures and emphasized the silhouettes: soft furry coats, silken shirts with high necks or deep plunging V's, poet blousons tied with a bow, shimmering sequin covered suits.
Trousers tucked into leather boots projected the air of a country manor surveyor. Suits coats were double-breasted, with a silken underlayer providing contrast. Formal trousers were set off by cummerbunds.
With the focus on tailoring, accents were few: tassels on a scarf, gleaming floral broaches, spare use of lace and sequins. Trailing bows added flourish.
The mostly black collection was broken up by gray, interludes of white and more casual moments of denim and camel.
Amazon founder Jeff Bezos and his wife, Lauren Sanchez, were among the front-row guests. Sanchez’s son, Nikko Gonzalez, walked in the show.
MSGM CELEBRATES SPEED
The Milan fashion morning commute started in a metro station where MSGM creative director Massimo Giorgetti considered how the world has speeded up in a collection that celebrates Milan’s oldest subway line but also the passage into adulthood.
“It is an ironic reflection on the importance of finding some time, because we are asked to go so fast,’’ Giorgetti said before the show.
The collection’s key motif was a curved red handrail designed for Milan's 60-year-old red line by the late architect Franco Albini. Symbolizing how the subway speeded life in the city, it traces a graceful track down the front of coats and was worn as a broach, carried as a bag.
Silken shirts and shorts featured digital prints made from Google AI technology, which is speeding creative impulses.
The collection also marked the sometimes impatient passage to adulthood, from streetwear to formal wear via knitwear briefs and matching hoodies woven with silver tinsel, striped tops gleaming with clear sequins under suits and a casual suit jacket over a graphic shirt and jeans.
To close the show, models mimicked video game characters, striding bunched together through the underground tunnel to the Super Mario Bros. soundtrack.
