Fausto Puglisi definitely speaks his mind; being an independent designer, he’s able to say and do what he pleases. The idea of freedom was front and center while he was making his Resort collection, which read almost like a manifesto on diversity. “At a time like the one we’re living in, freedom is the first thing to defend and to restate,” he said. He played the diversity note not only by offering a collection suited to disparate body types, but also in the lookbook’s idiosyncratic casting.
The characters involved in the production, which was shot in his design studio, include the controversial Italian singer and Instagram sensation Myss Keta, who performs her subversive lyrics in a face mask, and the Italian influencer and musician Elodie Di Patrizi. “They’re very intelligent women, their physicality is strong and sexy, but not perfect,” said Puglisi. “That’s what I like about them.” To drive home the point, he put Myss Keta in his signature bodycon stretchy lycra dresses slashed with bold colors or in almost-non-existent black numbers, short and curvaceous, paired with thigh-high silver stiletto boots. A Versace-redolent long dress in black crêpe studded with gold insignia and with up-to-there side slits, as worn on Di Patrizi, looked as if it could stop Milanese traffic dead. In comparison, model Ella Hope seemed almost tame, sporting romantic tiered dresses printed with camouflage motifs, tailored bicolored skirt suits, and fluid body-skimming pantsuits.
But the casting’s pièce de résistance was the model Andrei Alin, an art student at Milan’s Brera Academy of Fine Arts. Lanky and slender, he looked great in the women’s clothes, sporting a studded black leather minidress, a sharp-cut ’70s-inspired pantsuit with flares and an elongated jacket with a fringed hem. Quite bourgeois-looking, the jacket was made out of a lavender silk-lamé tweed from Laurent Garigue, one of the suppliers of expensive tweeds to the house of Chanel. Asked about Alin’s androgynous physicality, a far cry from the muscular alpha-males Puglisi has always favored, he said, “I didn’t want to show any beefy men anymore. We’re living in such a fascist moment in Italy and in the world, I really wanted to keep away from this idea of machismo.” The willowy Alin looked anything but macho. “He’s a cross between Mick Jagger and Rudolf Nureyev,” said Puglisi. “He’s virile, but he’s free.”
