"Love Me Forever or Never," demanded the slogan on Andrea Pompilio's lilac bowling shirts and jackets. OK, OK—but can't a guy just sit on the fence a little? The styling of this collection tried hard to signify a threw-it-all-together effortlessness—"weighted disorder" in Pompilio-ese—that sometimes could have done with looking like it had actually demanded a bit more effort. When you tried to look at these pieces isolated from that disorder, there were some things to love—maybe not forever, but for a while.
Pompilio's leaf-print camo, oversized ruby shirts, and bottle-green silk track pants under a bicolored baseball jacket all worked well. At times the suiting was so sharp as to arouse thoughts of Canali—for whom Pompilio designs. The half-put-on chunky elaborations on the suede driving boot were part of Pompilio's imagined context: a group of pals all staying at someone's grandma's place in the country for the weekend. The idea was that they just pulled stuff on, some of it, possibly poor absent grandma's—"maybe the little culottes"—and some of it gardening boots that were just hanging around. This was Pompilio's 10th collection, he said backstage, and you could see how deeply the designer is locked into his internalized projection of his imaginary man. Pompilio could relax a little, though—maybe drop all those scarves—and focus on presenting the clothes as building blocks for others to play with, rather than obfuscating them with a garbled architecture of dressing. As a compadre summated nicely: "Who is this for?"
