It’s been a big week for Arthur Arbesser, one of Milan’s new generation of designers. Last Friday, he presented his first collection for the Italian sportswear company Iceberg, and today, an hour before his longtime former employer Giorgio Armani put on his own show, Arbesser took his young eponymous brand to the runway for the first time. There was already a sense of occasion. It was a fact Arbesser opted to accentuate by recruiting his friend, the composer and musician Jordan Hunt, to play live music, and by installing in the middle of the room a giant Balthus cat and a young woman who played the artist’s model on a low velvet chair.
Balthus’s favorite subjects were adolescent girls, and Arbesser used the famous painter’s oeuvre as a framework. The models’ hair was scraped carelessly to the side with bobby pins, and they wore white anklets with both their patent slingbacks and their Nikes. The pubescent edge-of-innocence thing can go dreadfully wrong. It’s a tribute to Arbesser’s sensitive spirit, and that of his collaborators, that it didn’t. At 33, he’s fairly youthful himself; he gets how young women want to dress. A paper-thin technical nylon coat and matching pants brought a sleek, athletic edge to the collection that felt genuine. But the stars were illustrator Agathe Singer’s lovely prints. If the naive cat motif on a pair of overalls and a raincoat won’t be for everyone, the lively floral that appeared on a flirty little dress, a pantsuit, and a long-sleeved T-shirt gown will find admirers well past their teenage years. This writer can attest to that.
