Simon Holloway was leafing through past editions of the no-longer-published Agnona magazine from the late 1970s and early 1980s when he stumbled across a trove of rather lovely film noir–style editorials featuring the knit house’s garments in makeup shades: chocolate, taupe, nude, plum. These proved the starting point for a collection that enveloped the “protection” theme running through this season in a softly colored, innovatively fabricated, totally luxurious, and ever so slightly retro-futurist-flavored wrapping.
Those down inserts were the satin-wrapped inner layer of double-faced cashmere coats and parkas: double protection, worn over knit dresses or slip dresses and wedge boots wreathed with rope-like coils. The prints on those silk dresses and shirts, worn above attractive cashmere-lined, high-waisted nappa trousers, were decoupage reproductions of the old shoots that first sparked Holloway’s creative direction this season.
Holloway’s counterpart at Ermenegildo Zegna, Alessandro Sartori, was in the audience today and would rightly have been impressed by a fine rustic-yarn three-piece suit that updated the form with poppered fastenings at the ankle and a cool-looking track-tabard vest. Berry-dyed Donegal tweeds were enmeshed with satin and nylon down inserts in a lush-looking peacoat-bomber hybrid. At the last, Holloway ramped up the color via a dégradé alpaca/cashmere/shearling coat striped in a powerful orange, and an all-orange double-faced mohair overcoat over a long tunic in Shetland wool. Both protective and innovative, this Agnona collection would, you reckoned, not only insulate but embolden its wearer, too.
