Strolling down to the Etro boutique this afternoon, Via Monte Napoleone was peak Via Monte Napoleone. Outside Valentino a fat man in a one-seater Smart car smoked his cigar with the window down, playing funky saxophone house at top volume. A beautiful woman in a shaved mink and thigh-highs, heaped with shopping bags, stared through the reflection of her rhinoplasty bandage at the pavé diamonds in Vhernier.
On the sidewalk across Etro there was a crowd looking up at the five masked mannequins set perilously on the edge of the first floor balcony in richly patterned parkas and piumini. Inside—oh Lord—there was a group of Etro-clad interpretive mime artists, some wearing plain white masks, some wearing plain white masks with long gray beards. There are few things less liable to make you feel self-conscious than a mime artist mimicking you while you work—in this case your reporter was feeling the pile on one of those aforementioned piumini and checking the jacquard on the suit below it.
The collection was a beguiling mix of fantasy and reality. There was a dreamy fairy-tale theme running through the decorations in jacquard, print, or embroidery on these pieces—dragons, unicorns, slightly freaky fairies, and the like—which also presumably informed the Legolas vibe in the casting of this lookbook. There were some pretty forest-print parkas and a bomber jacket decorated with alchemical symbols in metal thread.
The reality part of the the collection lay in its fabrication. That wonderful brushed overcoat in a dark, rich check was entirely made of recycled fabric, the boldly decorated oxford shirting was made in sustainably produced eucalyptus fiber, or bamboo, as well as “biological” cotton drawn from producers working to make this especially wasteful material less so. The cashmeres were colored in dyes drawn from flowers and roots, and check raincoats made of recycled plastic bottles.
“It’s about the aesthetics of a dream but also about ethics,” said Kean Etro of the collection. Unlike his mime artists, he wasn’t pretending.
