“I wished I were in Milan with her. I would like to eat at the Cova and then walk down the Via Manzoni in the hot evening and cross over and turn off along the canal and go to the hotel with Catherine Barkley.” So Ernest Hemingway wrote in his second novel A Farewell to Arms, a fictionalized account of his own time in Milan. Hemingway came to the city as a volunteer ambulance driver for the Red Cross and was injured and hospitalized for six months, during which time he was awarded a medal for his bravery by the Italian authorities and fell in love with a nurse, Agnes. Agnes and Ernest decided to marry. Then he shipped home, and she had her head turned by an Italian officer: C’est la guerre.
Milan’s Boglioli was not around back then—it was born in 1974—and neither was the fully developed role that Hemingway would eventually create for himself as the appetite-filled, richly bearded, barrel-chested, bionically brained masculine superhero of North American literature. For anyone who has watched Ken Burns and Lynn Novick’s epic PBS documentary on the man, you can see that Hemingway chose his clothes almost as carefully as his words in order to write a visible costume of the values he aspired, successfully, to embody.
Which brings us back to Boglioli, which makes a fine rendition of the safari jacket, or the “Hemingway,” that would extremely effectively allow you to harness that midcentury Big Game energy. In this collection it was presented in superlight navy denim, two pulsating colorways in linen, and a more Key West–specific taupe.
The rest of the collection was less Hemingway and more “Good Italian,” which was the writer’s definition of Italian sprezzatura—the masculine clothes consciousness that he surely was inspired by to shape to his own ends.
Cotton and Tencel or cotton and linen blends, carefully garment-dyed, were used to craft neatly proportioned pieces of deconstructed tailoring that you would choose carefully before wearing lightly. To cater for the post-Hemingway generations, there were some discreetly rich cashmere cotton sportswear “sweats.” Any man looking to embellish his own worn story could benefit from a piece of Boglioli’s carefully crafted rhetoric.
