Props to the Ferragamo clan for pressing restart on its womenswear. Something that didn’t work at all was, today, superseded by something that looks very hopeful indeed. The promotion of Paul Andrew to creative director, plus the decision to show his work alongside that of Ferragamo’s menswear designer Guillaume Meilland, bore immediate fruit in that you walked away from this show thinking about what you’d like to wear, rather than counting your blessings that you never had to see any of it again.
That’s a relatively low bar, but baby steps. At a preview in the Ferragamo studio earlier this week, both designers seemed to have developed a real rapport. They seemed to relish being on the same page. Andrew said: “We started the entire process together. Everything we’ve done from the color palette, the fabric selection, the fittings—there was a guy and a girl there all the time.”
Meilland added: “We’ve swapped things, tried pieces on the boy, tried pieces on the girl, so it was a very organic way of working.”
Andrew said his inspirations for the season included original Ferragamo client Katharine Hepburn and the notion of “naughty pedigree,” inspired by Vanessa Kirby’s portrayal of Princess Margaret in The Crown. Most literally, those thoughts resulted in some excellent women’s tailoring (à la Hepburn) notable for a pant that came with a wide, inverted single plisse at the side meant to be clipped at the ankle—the shape this produced was very fetching. Nubuck ponchos worn over velvet dresses and the odd pant tucked, jodhpur-style, into boots hinted at a sybaritic aristo à la Margaret.
Those themes, though, rarely truly registered in a collection—strictly, two collections—that felt like a very carefully enunciated brand statement much broader in intent. Why so much leather? Ferragamo is a leather house. The suede trenches in emerald or Bordeaux were beautiful, the napa pants were less so. In menswear, a pale shearling shirt-hemmed jacket was a gorgeously want-able thing, but leather shirting is always debatable in its practicality. Andrew is a shoe guy, but an ostrich suit that so directly echoed his very fine ostrich knee-highs was a comment so straightforward it could have been left unsaid.
Those silk foulard pieces were in archive Ferragamo prints and looked fine as linings in this collection’s broadly impressive outerwear offer or as flowing separates and shirtdresses. Ferragamo’s Doppio Gancini fastening was used to its utmost as the shape of a cutaway in those knee-highs, the (cleverly reversible) hardware on a supercute loafer, as a belt buckle, and even as the eye shape in a great round-shouldered quilt-lined men’s blue raincoat. On the heel of a men’s derby, the Doppio Gancini clinked like spurs with every footstep.
Around these brand codes, both Andrew and Meilland built wardrobes that, on the whole, looked good above the all-important footwear they were there to complement. These wardrobes also worked well alongside each other: You could imagine the Ferragamo woman and the Ferragamo man as friends, lovers, or siblings. For Season 1 of this freshly minted design duo, that’s an achievement. As Andrew correctly observed: “At a certain point, when you were going into a Ferragamo store and it was like schizophrenia, who knew what we were even standing for? It’s essential that we have a single voice. Our man and our woman are together.”
So, then, reset completely. Now let’s see where the newly rebooted Ferragamo chooses to walk and what stories it chooses to tell. The prospect of being truly excited by a Ferragamo show until recently felt extremely distant—now it looks highly reachable.
