Every good designer pours personal passion into their work. With Arthur Arbesser there is a particular narrative intimacy that sees the encounters he experiences in life inflect the garments he fashions for work. The chief example in this collection, he revealed through chat in a preview before today’s showroom presentation, came after the 90-something Salzburg priest who had baptized Arbesser saw his name in the credits of an opera Arbesser costume designed and, after 30-plus years, got in touch.
“This fellow, a prelate named Neuhardt, was a friend of my late grandmother and also an art historian and he contacted me out of the blue. It was so interesting to talk with him—you can always learn from those who are older than you,” said Arbesser. “Just because he thought it might interest me, he sent me this digital archive he had of renaissance and baroque swatches, really beautiful and opulent materials.” So started the development of this small but lovely collection, via the development of a print of those ancient decorative pieces arranged within a vivid scrawled context created by Arbesser. The swatches provoked thoughts of Old Masters Bronzino and Pontormo and the ephemera of their backgrounds. This in turn led to a brushstroke print—“as if it is of the painter getting ready to paint and testing their colors”—on sleek wool dresses.
Complementary gridded fabrics from unused past collections were pressed and serviced into large armed tops, and grid patterned mohair recruited for jumpers. Riffing on Prada’s sheer skirts, Arbesser declared a satisfied adjacency in his wide-gauge knit skirts that appear deconstructed and reveal—if cerebrally—a little more of the wearer than his collections usually do. Arbesser is that rare thing in Milan, an artist in his garret, so let’s hope the skirts take off as they deserve to.
