The message at Boglioli felt as messy as the canvasses in the art studio background of this lookbook. To the side of this company’s Pitti pavilion was a handsome poster stating that the inspiration for this season’s output was a young businessman’s epiphany over his lunch encounter with Rothko’s contributions to the old Four Seasons (whose new, second iteration recently shut down). Aside from the fact that Rothko’s murals never made the walls of the restaurant, none of the earnest and perfectly nice Boglioli crew I cornered mentioned any of this flimflam until I brought it up after a long conversation about the big push they had been making into softening silhouettes and garment dyeing. The clothes themselves were pleasing enough, sometimes beautiful, and consistently Boglioli-ian, but we were in the middle of a three-floor pavilion jammed with hundreds of different Italian menswear houses—and outside there were more pavilions with thousands of brands from around the world.
Perhaps the time spent here could have resulted in an epiphany over a previously unseen designer (exploring new houses is the great joy of Pitti) who had more substance than the fiction on the wall. Boglioli has just struck a new deal to outfit AC Milan, which is a strong statement in the domestic Italian market. Maybe the brand should focus on tweaking its fine clothes and working on this more straightforward form of messaging than chucking random rhetoric at a wall, then hoping we’ll swallow it after its several-year period pushing a runway format in Milan that in the end—just like the Four Seasons Rothko nod—never bore the fruit it was supposed to.
