Balefully staring from the walls of this garage showspace were the subjects of scores of old portraits; these included some well-off officers from the 1910s, a girl with a bob and a red kimono lying in an art deco frame, an Edwardian lady wandering through a flower meadow in white lace, and a group of late 19th century hunters. Just down the bench Veronica Etro said all of these had been collected by her father, Gerolamo, partly for pleasure and partly for professional reasons. “Some of them are of our ancestors and others he bought because he liked the clothes. See that woman with the paisley sash? He likes uniforms, writing, and military… I like that they are here today looking down on us.”
Gerolamo’s collection was handed down to Veronica and her siblings, brother Kean included. Backstage Kean was resplendent in a red velvet jacket, which he promptly took off. “So this is a love jacket. For me it’s an archetype. I started wearing it in 2005—and this is my heart beating inside.” The orange lining was imprinted with Mexican folk framed pictures of Kean and his wife. “It’s me and Constanza and this is our Mexican altar, our altar of love.”
The jacket, in other words, was Kean’s portrait for posterity, commissioned upon a canvas of his preference, and of the person most important to him—just as many of those portraits outside were for others. Via a lot of entertaining Keanish conversation we got to the point that the collection was about ancestry—both personal to him and more broadly cultural: “call them family ties, tribal ties”—and handed-down traditions and mannerisms and the adaptation of old wisdom to today.
Cut center stage then to a series of looks that you could say were archetypally clustered, but loosely so. There was a spot of languid time travel, à la Vuitton women’s wear last season, from the great-coated and riding-booted openers at the beginning (not unlike those of the army officers and hunters staring down from above) to the closing firework barrage of corduroy suiting in top-to-toe color featuring slim kicky pants and sometimes overlaid with piumino (the Italian and much more elegant equivalent of puffer) gilets in the same color.
Between these more defined sections came far more hazily stirred incarnations of the Etro stew: a fringed blanket topcat above black denim and a cowpoke’s belt; Mark Vanderloo (his return along with John Kortajarena was another cross-generational undertow here) shoulder-robing an abstracted regimental/blanket stripe overcoat above a contrasting bead piped suit; a fringed blanket and leather western and peacoat hybrid; a monochrome leopard print ponyskin topcoat over skinny jeans and Chelsea boots; and a short cloak coat beaded with paisley seeds twisted at the top to resemble the outline of two preening peacocks.
Overall, the emphasis on suiting meant that the collection was not quite as bohemian in actuality as the rhetoric around it. However going back to that love jacket, it did parlay that tailoring would fittingly be at the heart here.
The talk of repetition and variation through a constant of time brought thought of sustainability and recycling, which Etro has a pretty strong record on. Today even Kean spoke of his admiration for other houses’ work and how he would cherish pieces of them for himself were they blamelessly acquired: “So if I go to a flea market, and I've always been going, and I find a piece from, let's say, Zegna, or, let's say Brioni, then I will treasure it: I think this is the way to do this work, you know?”
There were outside this show a few very well-mannered demonstrators from Extinction Rebellion, whose placards said they were focused on the damage caused by pesticides in cotton production. Kean said he agrees with the ER movement and noted that “about” 50% of the cotton was organic, and therefore pesticide-free. He added that personally he finds the material challenging, and cited hemp (no surprise there) as an alluring alternative: “You know I am trying, man, and I will never stop.” Kean has not only being saying that things need to change for a long time, he has been working to action that change too (just check his history)—so selecting this very good and very conscious show to target seemed rather a waste of ER’s resources.
