Less Loewe at long last, this latest collection from Bruno Sialelli was also more focused and succinct, and less desperate. A nice touch was to take creative license—with permission sought and obtained—from Hugo Pratt’s Corto Maltese series of what were once called comics but are now called graphic novels for the same reason designers are now called artistic directors. Corto Maltese began in the 1960s, continues to be popular in Europe but is less-well known in the US. It charts the progress of a tough but tender Roman-nosed maritime adventurer who encounters some of the early 20th century’s most important figures and is a bit like one of Joseph Conrad’s questing captain protagonists.
Sialelli repeated his seasonal graphic gesture by incorporating attractive watercolors on shirting and cells from the comics on various pieces including some striking scarves. By the end of this collection we were basically seeing Sialelli’s version of Maltese’s garb—look 52 and look 56 especially—as the climax of a deftly navigated voyage through typical territory for this designer. The problem is that this territory is neither especially exciting nor original. As a wise colleague noted in the Uber to Craig Green after, Sialelli is part of a quite well populated post-Ghesquière designer diaspora. Sialelli has a Peter Pan-like ‘playful’ insistence on reinterpreting via infantilization classic bourgeois French masculine garms while putting his women on a beautifully crafted yet over-pasteurized pedestal. The one area in which this collection did fly was in the clearly authentically-known aside into early ’90s skate culture that included a notable oversized riff on what reminded me of Etnies’ (a French brand, remember) breakthrough sneaker with the genius Natas Kaupas: after the Half Cab, a revolution in Ollie padding. There is a talented designer hiding inside Salielli, but we’ve yet to see enough of him.
