With the temperature here Milan still in the 80s, women in the streets and at shows are drifting around in full-length print dresses, talking wistfully about their vacations. Etro’s scene synced seamlessly with that longing for endless summer—not least because it’s also the title of the seminal surf-culture movie of 1964, Bruce Brown’s The Endless Summer. Sure enough, Etro brought in two female pro surfers, Victoria Vergara and Maribel Koucke, all beachy hair and natural smiles, sporting terrific neoprene swimwear, paisley-printed boards tucked under their arms.
They acted as personifiers of Veronica Etro’s feeling this season. She took her inspiration from “the skate and surfing scene of California, [and] the denim and calligraphy of Japan, the Pacific, and Hawaii. It’s really about being free, joyous.”
There’s always a place in fashion for the bohemian, culturally eclectic vibe which began with hippie dropout countercultures in the mid-1960s. In the 21st century, it’s reborn in the mainstream wellness and meditation movement—the modern ideal of a sound mind in a superhot athletic body, clad in an accidentally pretty print dress. Etro is the Italian stylistic epicenter for the luxurious version of all that—the torch held aloft in the second generation of the business by Veronica.
She’s well at home weaving happy, easy-to-wear vibes into a rich tapestry of a collection that spans everything from glam tiered dresses to pajama suits, to swimwear, hats, jewelry, towels, and homeware. The first look out epitomized it: a multi-pattern patchwork blanket thrown over the shoulders of a girl wearing a full-length paisley-print dress, a cowrie-shell pendant nestling in her cleavage.
Western assimilation of the textiles of indigenous craftspeople goes back centuries—Etro’s business is founded on the paisley pattern, a print bearing a very long story which originated in Persia, was adopted by Indian iconography, and first traveled into aspirational Western fashion as far back as the 16th century. The difference between now and even 10 years ago is that every instance of cultural quoting in fashion is rightly being interrogated—the good part of which is that thousands of peoples’ overwritten ethnographic histories are finally being revealed. Veronica Etro is conscious of that. To celebrate the brand’s 50th anniversary, an exhibition opens at the Mudec Museum of Cultures tomorrow, and it is endorsed by anthropological research. It’s called “Generation Paisley,” and it promises to take a “visionary and conscious point of view” of what this company reflects.
