A big part of what makes Agnona so very special is its fabrication, the details of which can be challenging to glean when the clothes are whooshing past at speed. Happily, the label’s designer, Simon Holloway, is on hand and willing to dig deep into the granular data.
Take the trenchcoat in Look 13: “That’s in a silk dupioni woven on an antique narrow loom. There are only four of them left, and when a part breaks down, we have to remake it from scratch.” Or the check tailored looks that ran through the midsection of the show: “These are all in patterns taken from the Agnona archive and made in double-face Century cashmere.” As for the attractive double-breasted, short-sleeve, shirting-reminiscent wrap dress of Look 34: “It’s a yarn-dyed crepe de Chine in a candy stripe. And the belt is napa wrapped around cork.”
These were a few of the ingredients in a collection that saw Holloway zero in on Milan’s golden age intersection of fashion and industrial design, the late ’70s to early ’80s. He said: “It was before everyone became obsessed with shoes and handbags, and fashion was all about daywear, which the Italians did better than anyone else.” His starting point had been a grainy, wide-angle photo of baggy pants–wearing Milanese clustering outside the first Memphis Group exhibition in 1981. This was the source of the pastel color story in the last third or so of a show that followed a first two-thirds as neutral as Switzerland. The attention to period silhouette here was precise in its “important” shouldered and low-skirted jackets, but these were also shapes you could imagine working in the world today. Although doubtless mind-meltingly expensive, there was a satisfying sense of roughness in the slubbiness of its silks and the texture of its piqué that contrasted pleasingly with the impeccable leather, voile, and cashmere. If you are both rich enough to buy Agnona and discerning enough to buy Agnona, then game over—you win.
