Has quirkiness and nonconformity disappeared entirely from the fashion system? Not when you’re looking at Italy’s multinational Capucci project, for which Bernhard Willhelm (German-born, Antwerp-trained, Paris-dwelling) oversees ready-to-wear, Sybilla (Spanish) designs the once-a-year evening collection, and Franca Maria Carraro (Italian) does the shoes. For spring, Willhelm had fun with the Roman founder’s extraordinary way with volumes. “I was playing with the idea of boxes last season,” he said. “This is sort of a continuation of that, but now I’ve added circles.” Lines of thick, wavy cord stitched onto the hems of short dresses were another, less conceptual borrowing from the archive.
The cutely eccentric flat shoes and a bright emerald plissé dress, whose ballooning sleeves were suspended from shoulder straps, made for the presentation’s best moments. Willhelm’s personal skew toward the eighties still comes through in an insistence on stripes and leaf-green shades. For curiosity value alone, the Capucci project is a line worth knowing about, but in actual fashion practice, these are strictly clothes for girls who will make their artsy way through the season, avoiding anything so obvious as a trend.
