Alongside a 10-million-year-old Indonesian tree fossil that was a gift from a well-wisher, Kean Etro’s board sat next to a small canvas painted, Etro said, by his herbalist. “He’s my amico,” said Kean. “This is a painting he gave me that he says shows how we are all connected, all the shapes are one.”
Get me that herbalist’s number, because whatever Kean’s having, I’ll have, too. Etro has a truly panoramic sensibility rooted in a long-counter, now-current-culture attitude: sustainability, togetherness, Gaia—that kind of thing.
This season Kean’s always-ajar doors of perception turned his ice-palace-via-Piranesi venue into a forest of bamboo plants meant to be meandered through. As you progressed you encountered groups of looks as well as Keanish asides: bottles of water an experimental Japanese outfit had permeated with the sonic waves of the word Etro, some kind of alpha-wave-scanner life-reset machine the queue was too long to linger for. In the middle was a clearing in which stood Kean, that mood board, the herbalist’s painting, four of five stressed-out Italian TV crews, and a huge nest of what Kean purported were dragons’ eggs. “Yes, dragons’ eggs,” he clarified of what were clearly not dragons’ eggs (fashion editors are easily duped, but we have our limits). “They are there because I think imagination, from imaggo—magic!—is part of sustainability. It’s an altogether-ness, and a belief in the possible.”
The collection was a sometimes-patchwork tour of an intermingled world. Kean explained how some of the pieces, for instance, referenced Indonesian patterns in a nod to what he said was the introduction of Dutch print to Africa via a detachment of soldiers from Benin deployed to Borneo in the 1890s. There were jute woven bomber jackets featuring Mexican dreaming symbols. One model held Kean’s recently acquired bamboo didgeridoo, while another posed with his 20-year-old bamboo yumi, the better (along with that forest and the print on many of the looks) to signal that much of the fabric here was bamboo too.
He explained: “Bamboo is virulent, infestate [invasive]! You don’t need water to grow it. And hemp! We should go for these fibers, and we do. I don’t know why cotton was chosen—it’s not cotton’s fault, it’s humanity’s fault.” You suspect that had Kean not been born a textiles scion he would be perfectly happy playing that didgeridoo in an ashram working on his recipes for nut butter. But as his excellent, conscious clothes continue to demonstrate, the Universe put him in exactly the right place.
