Womenswear sales at Kiton—although still secondary to menswear—are up 20 percent. What an appropriate 21st-century gender flip it would be if the apparent sunset of suiting was followed by a new dawn of popularity for the form driven by female consumers. Men, the slobs, could shuffle around in their hoodies and track pants, leaving it to women to relish inhabiting civilian clothing’s most evolved expression of power.
At Kiton, Maria Giovanna Paone continues to deliver exquisitely rendered feminocentric iterations of the tailoring form so refined by her family company. The soft-shouldered, cashmere, silk-flecked check suit in Look 10 and the belted windowpane in Look 8 were the best-expressed iterations here. Look 9’s sublime raw Irish linen jacket and Look 6’s seersucker-seeming-but-in-fact-cashmere-silk jackets had harder shoulders, which is fine—if a bit less comfortable. As women’s tailoring looks, they seemed a little muddied by the gathered skirt and the Bermuda short with which they were respectively teamed. A Vogue Runway boss of mine had only this morning reflected on the infantilizing effect of teaming shorts with tailored jackets—exactly as I have heard many menswear-heads postulate in the past. Kiton does more than suiting. The white cashmere coat—around $7,000 at retail—in Look 11 was a glorious item, but the country club–naval stuff in Looks 2 and 3 and the print shirtdress in Look 5 seemed a little off the path Kiton should be carving out for itself as a maker and purveyor of the finest female-designed, handmade Italian women’s tailoring in the world. To my (little) mind, Kiton should broaden its cultural and demographic aperture while fixing its focus squarely upon that tailoring metier.
