This September Kean Etro will show alongside Veronica Etro in a brother/sister–led co-ed first to mark the 50th anniversary in 2018 of this uniquely conscious Italian house. “We’ve started working closely together for two months now,” said Kean this afternoon. “She’s always been my little sister—Veronica is ten years younger than me—but the thing is I believe in matriarcale. I’m an Italian boy. So I am very happy to follow her; years are passing and this is an opportunity to play together again.”
This presentation, held in the house’s endearingly ungussied building on Via Spartaco, was a low-key preamble to September’s celebration: no runway today. Instead the Spring ’18 collection was upstairs on mannequins and shelves. T-shirts and scarves on those shelves mixed oversize paisley teardrops and kashmir motifs with prints from the Kama Sutra’s guide to co-ed yoga, an image of a psychedelic frog wearing a shamanistic headdress, and a Hendrix-inspired image of Etro’s founding father, Gerolamo, with a full head of hair drawn in Wes Wilson–esque swirls.
The mannequins wore linen-viscose or wool suiting of kashmir, overdyed madras, and paisley patterns. Fitted cotton army jackets in blue or navy cotton came with painted patches of swirl, beaded spiraling mandalas, and nonviolent military flashes wrought in colored pins. Linen-mix drawstring pants in stripes or plain ocher were worn above sometimes-fringed espadrilles with paisley and leather uppers.
Downstairs, Kean was in a room surrounded by some of his favorite texts drawn from a personal collection built to trace the warp and weft of pattern, both in fabric and thought. In addition to two of Etro’s weighty books of fabric from its archive, these included The Mahabharata, Robert M. Pirsig’s Lila, a chakra manual, the histories of a Piedmont hippy commune from the late ’60s, and Ignazio Maria Gallino’s broader history of the Italian countercultural press. Whether it’s yoga, environmentalism, raw food, youth protest, or social benevolence, so many preoccupations that first flourished around the time Gerolamo founded Etro are either ubiquitous or increasingly mainstream today. As Kean said: “These patterns have always been there.” Etro’s special bandwidth allows it to weave a wearable membrane that joins all these disparate but eternally enmeshed dots.
