In two days from now it will be a year since Boss held its baseball-themed, influencer-driven Russell Athletic collab here in Milan: since then the brand reported it has generated 40 billion impressions online. February’s filmed activation in Dubai—which received around 30 million views on YouTube alone—epitomized the brand’s push to boost both its appeal and revenues through non-traditional fashion events intricately meshed with digital engagement.
And yet tonight Boss was back in Milan with its new “senior vice president creative director” (aka design director) Marco Falcioni (a Boss veteran in other roles), presenting that most traditional of fashion events: a fashion show. Granted it was the first ever fashion show to be shoppable live on TikTok as it streamed (an experiment available in the UK only). But this chapter in Boss’s dizzying development represented a loop back towards the gravity of the fashion system in its marketing orbit.
The show was opened by Naomi Campbell, closed by Future, and featured an around equal split of professional models and starry guests. These included am-Bossador-in-chief Khaby Lame, Vogue Italia cover star Veronica Yoko Plebani, deaf trans actor/artist Chella Man, Sergio “Call Me Big Boy” Sylvestre and many more. Lee Min-ho was in the audience (he’d reportedly declined the invitation to walk).
Any assumption that a brand that seems to have been more focused on hoodies lately was pivoting away from suiting would have been dashed by this show. Falcioni explained he had gone back to those roots, but looked to retrain them in a new direction. He’d considered the ad campaigns of the 1980s—groups of hunky execs in suits looking pensive—and pondered how to recast their all-white, all-male image: “there was no diversity, which is serious.” The result was to consider soft power and also moto-gear—a slightly abstruse aside about the company’s sporting heritage—and, of course, completely upend the casting and credo of those bygone all-pale-male days. The result saw panels of canvassing that echoed moto’s protective padding placed on predictably precision-cut jackets. Shearling coats were coated with crumpled chrome Tyvek to reference engine work and suggest softness. A Tyvek suit was a reference to James Rosenquist’s Ensemble.
Miah Sullivan, Boss’s SVP global marketing and brand communications, said this brand return to the fashion arena—we were in a velodrome—was in part about retaining “credibility” in the fashion space. But it was also an exercise in expertly choreographed digital stimulation centered around a fashion show. A bit like the collection, which veered between tailoring and moto as rapidly as the stunt bikers at the finale sped around the set, this show was trying to be two things at once. And in that they both sort of succeeded.
