The lifeblood of Etro is the paisley pattern on which Gimmo Etro founded the family business in 1968. Wisely sensing that there is only a finite amount of inspiration to be derived from the print, Gimmo's daughter Veronica masterfully advanced it today by reconfiguring flora and fauna as a paisley for the future. She did it by engineering hand-painted prints for the entire collection. If they played as a comprehensive "fuck you" to the digital age, it was the more elevated notion of the hands-on artisanship of Japan that was Veronica's touchstone. (After Prada last night, we may have a developing story on our hands here.) She was feeling the primal discipline: martial arts, Orientalist paintings, the ingenuity of a dress cut from a square of fabric, the tradition of intricate knotting. But if her initial outfits took shape somewhere between the kimono and the judo suit, the collection expanded to embrace everything east of the Bosporus. The one-shouldered swag of an Indian sari, the elegance of a Chinese cheongsam, the attenuated line of a Nepalese kurta with matching pants, the airiness of a Persian caftan—the show turned into a veritable atlas of style.
All the time, Veronica was returning to Etro's wellspring of color and print. Which meant that, for all its peripatetic to-ing and fro-ing, the collection ended up being her most focused to date. Toward the end, she had the smarts to drop some solidly monochrome outfits into the mix, as palette-freshening pauses. And then one final outfit spread abstracted peacock wings and flew away. It made sense that Florence Welch was the soundtrack for the show. There was something about the floaty, caftan-y grandeur of that last look that seemed made for her.
