Last season's was a big-deal birthday show. This time it looked like Brioni was taking up a runway residency in Milan for good following years of static presentations. Often you can argue that traditional sartorial houses—of which Brioni is one of the foremost in Italy's pantheon—benefit from presenting their collections in an environment where you can push and pull at the garments, maybe even give them a test-drive for yourself. But Brendan Mullane is as engaged with the language of fashion as Brioni is rooted in the dialect of tailoring, thus the movement and mise-en-scène of runway suits his work. Back at the Sforza Castle, Mullane's Brioni was touched by the architecture of Carlo Scarpa. "His whole world was an understanding of season, mood, and material," said the designer backstage.
On two-button notched suits—Brioni's bread and butter—cut in super-light woolen silk there were hand-painted blocks and stripes in opaque shades of artist-mixed blue, green, and gold. Short-sleeve shirts, some similarly printed, some plain, were worn under also-sometimes-printed fine-knit T-shirts and over trousers—a not at all bad summer smart-casual suggestion. A raw silk shirt over Bermudas was another. Parkas of Japanese nylon were marked by Scarpa, too. But along with referring to the architecture of someone else, Mullane played with the canonical elements of his own house. Belts were applied to tailored jackets, countryman style, and further rustication of Brioni's sophistication was expressed through suede elbow patches and incongruous suede patch pockets with exposed stitching. The austerity of this show—the pounding music, the po-faced marching—rather belied the engaged, intellectual eccentricity Mullane teased out here. Brioni felt appropriately the king of this castle.
