There’s something about a dancer in their warm-up clothes that designers—and movie directors from Fame’s Alan Parker to Suspiria’s Luca Guadagnino—can’t resist. It could be the poignancy and potential in the hard work of practice. Lithe bodies in motion are seductive too, of course.
MM6’s design team took up the subject of rehearsal for spring. The audience sat on the stage of the Fondazione Cariplo and models made a circuitous route through the crowd while an orchestra, arranged in the theater’s seats, played bits of movie soundtracks, Laurie Anderson, and Igor Stravinsky’s “The Rite of Spring.”
The first look out made novel use of a leotard, stretching it around the waist of a black leather double-breasted coat. Nearly every look that followed incorporated bodysuits in one way or another: worn unsnapped over tube dresses, double-up and folded over on top of baggy jeans, or with a ribbed shrug and sweatpants. Maybe the reason the look appealed in the MM6 studio, where the specialty is real-world cool, is that it’s body-con dressing without the self-consciousness, meaning the effect isn’t try-hard. The models looked like they could be actual dancers who’d come in off the street.
Emphasizing that aspect was the destroyed look of some of the leotards, along with the T-shirts and jeans. The fine holes on the whisper-thin tees and the shredded denim would take years of wear and washing to achieve. The design crew here used laser-cutting to get theirs that way. Another clever and quite Margielian application of the time-worn quality came in the form of white satin coat and jeans “stained” pink from the model-dancers’ fuchsia tights and shoes. “You want fame? Well, fame costs. And right here is where you start paying…in sweat.” Either that or buy MM6.
