The new menswear director at Pringle of Scotland, Giuseppe Marretta, joined the house of argyle following a five-year stretch as head of design, knit, and jersey (womenswear) at Giorgio Armani.
Speaking at the company’s presentation in Paris, Marretta said: “The first thing that I had in mind when I was designing this collection was to bring some fun to menswear. When things are too serious, it’s boring…so I wanted to bring fun though color and through revisiting British culture through my Italian eyes, and to work via an incredible inspiration as David Hockney is, both as an icon of style and an artist.”
Hockney has many fans in fashion—Michael Kors, Christopher Bailey at Burberry, Jacquemus, JW Anderson, Fendi, Olympia Le-Tan, Paul Smith, Preen by Thornton Bregazzi, Ellery, and John Galliano are just a few labels that have also used his verve and art as inspiration for collections. And in September 2008 Clare Waight Keller dedicated a collection of womenswear to a bigger splash for no lesser house than Pringle of Scotland.
That made it difficult for Marretta to find much fresh water. For instance, we’d seen the pool-dappled pattern—which is very attractive—not just at Kors’s Hockney-hashing collection, but also this season at MSGM (in a collection simply enough about summer). Yet that’s not to conclude this was an altogether poor debut from Marretta, who clearly has some serious knitwear petrol in his engine following his time in Milan. The double-face wool-blend track pants and rib-knit sweaters in violently opposing lifeguard-uniform yellow and red were, as he said, fun. So were his pieces of reversible outerwear in checks that mashed Prince of Wales against argyle, which matched his a-lot-like-Birkenstock sandals. The intarsia-homage diving-figure sweater was cute. But if Marretta is going to revisit British culture through his Italian eyes, he should either do it in a completely new manner or find lesser explored but still visually compelling aspects of the culture he has moved from Armani to dive into.
