It’s long been a New York in-joke that the city is the only place in the world where people are nostalgic for when it was worse. It wasn't a particularly funny in-joke, as people with the air of war veterans reminisced about heroin-addled junkies roaming Alphabet City and all of the places that you simply wouldn’t, or couldn’t, go. But it kept a particular breed of urban dweller in nodding recognition of each other and their shared weathered-it-all tenacity, which has, of course, become lost in a city that now coddles its denizens with every convenience—except for the increasingly, improbably escalating rent. But that's another matter.
Giambattista Valli is not a New Yorker, but he’s a longtime fan of the place, and he looked to the down-and-out, gritty 1980s for his Fall 2016 Giamba collection, using the photographs of Nan Goldin, that infamous Bowery prophet, as his guide. On the mood board backstage: Here, a couple aping Sid and Nancy in tiered mini-tulle and shredded leather; there, Madonna (“but we don't care that it’s Madonna,” said Valli) lifting the shirt of Jean-Michel Basquiat and licking a stretch of his exposed skin. It was punk, but it was also a party.
“It's about a moment,” said Valli, and if this and Moschino’s ode to the Bonfire of the Vanities (by way of Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele’s supermodels sporting ball skirts and wifebeaters) the night before is any indication, the moment that young designers in Milan are fond of right now is the '80s. “It's a little kinky, a little dangerous, and really fun,” said Valli, whose models wore platform combat creepers and little leather hats, oversize crystal-embroidered sweatshirts and shaggy fur coat parkas and fishnet tights, large paillette sequins and Swiss-dot underskirts. It was nostalgia for the chemical madness of youth—even without the opiates. That one of the last looks, a frothy white confection, had a zipper held together by safety pins? Now that was pretty punk rock.
