Massimo Giorgetti had half a dozen prints of artist Elizabeth Peyton’s misty, water-colored portraits pasted onto his Fall MSGM mood board. There’s one coming up for sale at Christie’s, he said, that’s slated to sell for a million dollars. “She only took three years to become an important artist,” he sighed. Maybe Giorgetti was thinking of his own meteoric rise—as of last year, he’s the new man at Emilio Pucci, a little-known, out-of-left-field choice for the august Florentine house. He showed his third Pucci collection, for Pre, about a week ago.
The influence of Peyton’s work in today’s collection was fairly concrete: the sense of the spontaneous, the immediate, something dashed off quickly, capturing a moment. Giorgetti said he liked that, and there was a hurried sense to the outfits he showed, topped with tousled hair and bottomed with sneakers, the in-between bits of tailoring and sports mashed and mangled together. A sweater, say, with a chomped-up hem, as if knitters were interrupted before they got a chance to rib it; argyles were perforated with holes, and colors—hazmat orange, Hockney blue, a virulent geranium—zinged. It felt as if they hit your retina faster than others. Twisted about the body, the clothes seemed as if they were pulled on in a hurry, or in the dark.
Giorgetti liked the fact Peyton used her slapdash style to paint “normal people and royalty.” That was reflected in a mash-up of fabrics, casual and formal, sickly patent coats and trousers with felted wool cardigans, some of them pinned with plasticized corsages, as if from screwed-up prom dates. Print was almost abandoned—instead, Giorgetti used time-consuming methods, like intarsia inlays or jacquards, to weave his graphics. You might not have noticed: The designer blasted Cassius, the French electro band, to make everything pump with hyped-up speed, and the show barreled on by.
Rather than feeling a sense of dread over the pace of fashion today, or over the demands placed on a relatively young designer’s shoulders (Giorgetti is 39; in Milan many of his competitors have 20 years on him), you just felt re-energized. It seemed Giorgetti did too. If he’s feeling pressure, he certainly isn’t showing it.
