How to better come to terms with the millennial mindset if you’re past the expiration date? Paul Andrew, as far as fashion sense is concerned, tried a personal recipe. “I’ve sort of ‘curated’ this design team of amazing millennials around me to help me understand what it means to be a man in the new decade,” he said. The peculiar way young guys address masculine archetypes was apparently revealing for Ferragamo’s creative director. It was an instrumental subtext for the Fall collection: “Millennials break down archetypal references, mixing them into new categories that defy categorization,” Andrew said. He identified six different alpha-male paradigms of masculinity: The businessman, sailor, surfer, race car driver, soldier and biker. These served as canvas to create new masculine style species, mixed together into a freeform hybrid. “Once upon a time, men identified more clearly with these categories,” said Andrew. “If a surfer wanted to go to Wall Street, he surely didn’t know what to wear. Today you might be easily wearing surfer-style pants with a tailored jacket.” Have Wall Street dress codes really loosened up so much?
Andrew and his young design crew must have had a lot of fun designing the collection. If you sum up a sailor + businessman archetype, what do you get? Answer: A perfectly tailored peacoat in the finest herringbone Scottish tweed. If you’d like to add a bit of your inner ’80s Cali surfer to the mix, you’ll wear a matching pair of oversized shorts over the trousers of an impeccably tailored pinstriped suit, a three-piece extravaganza fit for a new breed of businessman + ocean man. Or else, the soldier + surfer combo could result in a daring twist on the camouflage pattern, inspired by a Hawaiian shirt and reworked in military colors.
The play on archetypes served the collection well; it seemed to energize it. There were plenty of great tailored pieces, re-proportioned and subtly inventive, yet retaining that elegant Ferragamo flair. Silhouettes were either slim, linear and slightly oversized, or more form fitted, with well-structured shoulders for impact. Sportswear was treated with the sophistication expected from the historical Florentine house’s high standards: Playing on archetypes or not, even millennials could (hopefully) be charmed by a new breed of old-school elegance.
