On a rainbow-edged runway carpet below crisscrossed arcs of scaffold-hung prayer flags, Veronica Etro presented an eye-saturating, world-traveling, tribal gathering of a collection that was full of pleasure and detail.
Yes, you could argue that the afghan-like shaggy knits; pleated silk caftan minidresses in riots of paisley; jackets and shirts studded with nonspecific ethnic weaves of thread and metal; and pretty much everything else here felt heavily rooted in the 1960s and early ’70s. Then add to it the feeling that retreating into nostalgia appears to be an empty cop-out right now. The counterpoint to that notion is to check your vantage point: It was on-the-cheap hippie Marco Polos going overground through Asia in the 1960s who first propelled many of these motifs into London, New York, and Paris. They are both too old and too enduring to be encapsulated by any single decade.
Backstage, Etro said, “I tried to do something joyful, full of collision and color explosion. It’s [a] festival of the world, not set really in one place—it is an imagined place.” It was a busy place, too, and to fully unpack it would probably demand a re-see. Worth noting, though, is that the natural seasonal emphasis on outerwear—from Central Asian padded jackets to northern European quilted puffers, all in rich brocades encompassing chinoiserie and, of course, paisley—obscured many fine dresses. Those that were presented uncovered—particularly powerful: the pleated, full-sleeved dress in subtle paisley-intersected leopard print with two horizontal panels of red paisley at the hem—were day-to-night paradigms for the decoratively bold. The Earth has its music for those who will listen read the patches on parkas and a knit half-hidden under a brocade down jacket. This Etro collection sang a familiar-to-this-house tune and it was pitch-perfect.
