If there was ever a fashion show with enough life to merit its live stream—and even repeated viewing—it was this humdinger from Antonio Marras. First, the clothes were extremely good, and (as is this designer is wont to do) they were also heaving with layered complication, splice, and sly insertion. Plus the casting—young, less young, fashion, and non-fashion alike—and the direction he decided to take resulted in what was as much a highly entertaining performance as it was a fashion show.
Marras’s starting point was with two women. His first was Eva Mameli, the Sardinian botanist, trailblazing academic, and mother of Italo Calvino. The second was Pina Bausch, the German dancer and choreographer. “But it is also a way for us to say that fashion should have no borders between ages, colors, genders, anything,” Marras added.
The clothes for men and women shared the same fabrications, prints, and brocades. Both men and women wore new-condition vintage tailored herringbone and tweed jackets that Marras said he had sourced from Prato and then Marras-ized by cutting them up and rebuilding them again with extra panels of fabric and added bolsters of embroidery. There was a little bit of contemporary streetwear—parkas and tracksuits—and some wonderfully ruched yet angular velvet dresses in yellow and teal (in which one could imagine Katharine Hepburn leaning on a piano and singing bewitchingly). Out on the runway, the looks unfolded as usual—until a couple started dramatically throwing each other this way and that. Throughout the show, performers from Milan’s Teatro della Danza exercised anguished and passionate articulations of human emotion and desire. One dancer was not a professional, gallerist Pasquale Leccese, who (along with critic Cristina Morozzi) was one of the more mature members of this inspiring ensemble. At the finale, the cast, designer, and the designer’s dog, Pierivo, raced around the runway—great, joyful stuff.
