The hollow fashion of Milan Fashion Week

After hers and Raf Simons' brilliant show, Miuccia Prada said: «I got tired talking about ideas—let’s talk about clothes», summarizing with disarming simplicity an entire mood that has been variously interpreted on the many runways these days. What impression did this fashion week leave us with? That of an industry that has become properly "industry" in the most classic, capitalist sense of the term: committed to reassurance, challenged or disenchanted with eccentricity and dreaming, resolute in seeking the secret recipe for increasingly elusive success. Centuries ago, the richest kings and queens retained alchemists for years who promised them they could turn lead and straw into gold. Today, designers are the new alchemists, called upon to transmute shoes and handbags into hard cash, to search the chaos of natural elements for that philosopher's stone named "revenue growth" - just like alchemy, however, fashion is not an exact science, and often a sum is not really the simple result of addends. If anything this fashion week has proven, however, it is the need to have faith in the vision of the creatives: all the most beloved shows this season, in fact, have been those where the hand of an auteur capable of leading us to unknown destinations but with a clear direction in mind was felt. There is no room, in a world of such stark contrasts, for the lukewarm middle ground: audiences must be overwhelmed, not seduced.

Bottega Veneta SS24

Prada SS24

Bally SS24

AVAVAV SS24

Ferrari SS24

Jil Sander SS24

Sunnei SS24

Tod's SS24

Ferragamo SS24

Fendi SS24

We think of Prada's stunning organza dress, a very simple sheath dress that, when you walk in it, seems to be enveloped in evanescent clouds of smoke. Let's think of Matthieu Blazy, for all intents and purposes the man who carries the entire fashion week on his shoulders to the tune of woven leather, raffia skirts, dresses that seem frozen in a kind of Ovidian marine metamorphosis. Let us think of Rocco Iannone who, after a few seasons, has found a coherent and interesting language with his Ferrari, an operation whose success is by no means obvious and almost heroic in its ambitions; and of Walter Chiapponi who has created a stupendous swan song with his latest Tod's show. Let us also think of Sunnei and AVAVAV and their brilliant humor, the dazzling perfection of Maximilian Davies' Ferragamo and Jil Sander, or the ability Simone Bellotti had to distill the Swiss spirit of Bally with such sublime simplicity - in that very show we saw perhaps the most immaculately cut bowling shirt in recent years. The Attico also struck a right note in its debut, yet the singing was not as perfect as the show's stupendous set-up promised: unconvincing, perhaps sloppy styling weighed down the final outcome of the show-one can be promoted even without receiving praise, after all.

Gucci SS24

Blumarine SS24

The Attico SS24

Tom Ford SS24

Versace SS24

Elsewhere, a normcore reigned supreme that, in its monotony, hinted at the emergence of a new lingua franca, seeming almost to be the imprint of a new establishment so interested in continuity and longevity that it reproduces, translates and prolongs the present in eternity as in an illusionistic Droste effect, when we stand between two opposing mirrors and our reflection appears repeated in an endless sequence with no beginning or end. Something similar gave Sabato De Sarno with Gucci, with a collection that was very divisive, but actually cleansed the palate of the mega-brand's audience and sowed the seeds of a more concrete vision for the future, which, to find its proper breath, will still need the organic time to grow and branch out: even the most majestic oak has debuted as a timid sprout - but its greatness is already written in its most tender leaves and slender stem. Fashion, by nature and necessity, must always be ahead of the curve, but what happens when that curve seems to be part of a flat circle in which what is in front of us is actually what we had left behind and vice versa? 

The question has been recurring among the week's most impromptu thoughts and reflections. Having exhausted the universal quests of fashion (all brands are sustainable now, all inclusive, all lined up on the right side of history: the "fashion of ideologies" area is largely emptied out now) we turn to the micro-verse of things, from planets and constellations we now look at atoms and molecules, from utopias we return to talk of craftsmanship. A descent into the private cosmos of the wardrobe in which still hovers the specter of mysterious and elusive "self-expression" but which rewards the concrete architecture of things, the subtlety of an intuition that does not tolerate watered-down clichés. This season more than in the others, in fact, the programmatic banality, the aurea mediocritas was as transparent as certain blouses, lace and translucent fabrics seen on the runway. More than futuristic creativity, however, more than revolutionary designs capable of turning the axis of the world upside down the thing that was truly lacking was culture - that diplomatic relationship that fashion once had with music, art and literature, all spheres capable of providing interesting thematic keys to interpretation, exciting references capable of unifying so many different looks in the same collection, vectors of visions and fantasies. Today culture is confused with nostalgia: but the past is often an inert thing, while culture lives to the extent that we engage with it and spread it. It is not enough to repot ideas; one must make them take new roots and experiment with new grafts. Many quotes this season have stopped at pure academicism, and in fact, for the most part, many collections have seemed academic: formally sound, but lacking the soul that for better or worse makes a fashion brand great. One always falls in love with a designer, even through his clothes - but one never falls in love with just the clothes and that's it.