A dog on the runway will always win points in this critic’s notebook. Yet Canita, the companion of Igor Ramírez García-Peralta, founder of Solar magazine, was an especially excellent canine addition to the Etro runway today; wiry of hair, noble of haunch, perky of expression, and moist of nose. His owner and the majority of the men at this show were nonprofessional models recruited by Kean Etro to show off this typically warm and beguiling Etro collection. That’s been done before, sure, but the interesting thing here was that Kean gave his recruits carte blanche to choose their own pieces to wear, rather than being styled into them.
So after a slightly confusing opening video in which a chap threw himself tragically into the Mediterranean before meeting a gorgeous girl in an Etro dress underwater and reaching paradise, Kean’s parade of real men unfolded.
Highlights included Beniamino Saibene, an “urban farmer” and film festival organizer, who wore a beautiful delicately patterned blue silk suit with its cuffs turned up just like you should; Stefano Pitigliani, a really delightful chap who works for Karla Otto in Italy, kept his radically furled. Nicolò Gialain, a photographer, wore a supple suede field jacket with baggy and turned-up ocher striped pants. Tommaso Sacchi, head of the Cultural Cabinet of Florence, was magisterial in black pants and a yellow, scarlet-flashed shirt. Vlad Ipate, Kean’s regular fit model, upgraded to the unreality of runway in an ikat shirt. Alessandro Frigerio wore a fine deep mustard short robe jacket half-tucked into his silk ikat pants, and no shoes. When he spotted his wife, Veronica, on the runway, he lost his Blue Steel and broke into a toothy smile. “He’s an amazing fellow!” said Kean backstage of his brother-in-law, “so full of energy and happiness: a happy lawyer!” Kean’s sons were in the show too. The sparks of recognition that kept firing in the room gave this collection its good vibe. But the notion of real men choosing their clothes and looking fine in them delivered a longer-lasting glow.
