Ah, that’s better. On a stormy, stacked-up, and back-to-back day of shows in Milan, Etro proved a port of momentary respite. Bob Dylan’s overlooked soundtrack to Pat Garrett & Billy the Kid twanged as a sonic massage on a gentle loop. After a season’s hiatus, guests fondly reacquainted themselves with the ceremony of surreptitiously swapping the patterned Etro pillows left on their bench for those of a yet-to-arrive neighbor.
Veronica Etro neatly encapsulated her collection: “[It is] as if Ettore Sottsass and Laura Ingalls were chatting together and making this new synthesis of handmade earthiness and rigorous postmodernism.” If not quite “Little Bauhaus on the Prairie,” you could see what Etro was getting at. She incorporated Memphis-touched patterns and Damier, and imposed a rigorous campaign to connect her swirling source material with a larger geometric logic established on her toiles. This, though, was quite hard to discern as the clothes walked past simply because they were so very intensely various in their dizzying pattern and so very broad in their source material. Was that Peruvian, Patagonian, Navajo, paisley, or something else? It was probably all of the above and more, and was described by Etro as an “ethnic futurism.” The fine knits spun so precisely in the globe-trotting patterns that Etro played with were impressive; they looked to have been printed rather than conjured up at the source. The nub of it was a kaleidoscope of expected Etro-ness—appealingly boho dresses, tailoring fastened with scarlet-stoned buttons, fringed shearlings, and blanket coats with printed panels—that was intensified and enriched by Veronica’s addition of today’s fresh conceptual filters.
