AMONG the many practical elements missing from Miuccia Prada’s latest collection of men’s wear for winter 2008 were coats, scarves, hats or much of anything else to keep out the cold. This was not the only thing to suggest Ms. Prada has some complex sexual issues to work through.
Speaking after Sunday’s show to Suzy Menkes, the fashion critic for The International Herald Tribune, Ms. Prada quipped that the collection was revenge on men for the social and sartorial contortions they impose on women. She laughed when she said it, but she clearly wasn’t kidding around.
It is no stretch to suggest that the Prada collection read like the manifesto of a gender revanchist. The man in Ms. Prada’s current vision was domesticated and so passive as to be a neuter. One notes this not merely because the models looked abnormally robotic and were given nothing to wear outside the house.
Like a flipped version of the Unwomen in Margaret Atwood’s feminist parable “The Handmaid’s Tale,” the Prada Unman was gotten up in humiliating tutu belts, severe high-collar shirts that buttoned up the back and odd cummerbunds that disappeared in a chevron down the front of trousers conspicuously lacking a fly.
As usual with this designer, there were things to admire: a lean clerical silhouette, the severity of a nearly monochrome palette, the way color and its absence were used to mark out the torso in floating zones. But when designers stop conceding to biological function, they move away from the realm of fashion and into that of social engineering. It is one thing to nudge men toward exploring their girly sides and quite another to suggest they sit to urinate.
Still, points to the woman who is without question the most intellectually alert designer to show here for exploiting an idea while most of the competition is content to rummage through a grab bag of shopworn cultural references, slack attitudes and clichés.
There are, in other words, days in the life of a fashion observer when having a nail driven into one’s skull seems preferable to sitting through another evocation of the so-called rock ’n’ roll style. True, there was a time when rock stars dressed with offhand brio and loony extravagance and actually wore leather pants. But Jim Morrison, for the record, died in 1971. Except for style hounds like Rufus Wainwright and Amy Winehouse, most musicians these days dress for the stage in more or less the same crumpled Levi’s corduroy jeans they wear to compose their songs, sitting in a bedroom at a computer screen.
So it seems willfully dated when designers like Frida Giannini at Gucci haul out the paisley scarves, the velvets, the eyeliner, the grommet boots and wraparound Gypsy belts. Her collection was informed by a narrative she titled “Russian Rock.” It was styled after a singer from the group Gogol Bordello named Eugene Hutz.
If you happen to have visited Moscow lately, you are aware that Russian rockers are no more likely to dress this way than are their Western counterparts, at least not without a self-conscious wink. Subdued chic is Russia’s new order of the day, and this extends even to musicians. The coolest, and in some sense the most fashionable, person I saw on a recent visit was a musician walking in Red Square with his head shaved except for a cascade of dreadlocks and with a wide belt cinching blue workman coveralls.
A look like that might be pushing things at Gucci, a multinational whose challenge is to “model” markets — that is, standardize taste and expectation among luxury goods consumers in markets both established and new.
Yet it would be a lot more credible and refreshing than a Gucci collection that seemed like a momentary pause on a style loop that included, as it often does, other rock-inspired designers like Ennio Capasa at Costume National (Pete Doherty still holds sway at this label), or Roberto Cavalli, whose surprisingly subdued show of suits with peaked shoulders, nipped waists and wide-leg trousers also included his more signature ostentations, like outerwear made of snakeskin or patterned to look like leopard or giraffe or even (this closed the show) a PETA-defiant coat that resembled the pelt of King Kong.
“Designing a collection is like producing a record,” the rapper and entrepreneur Jay-Z said at a private dinner Donatella Versace gave after her show. Wearing a Versace suit, with a tie held in place by an emerald Cartier tie bar (a gift from his girlfriend, Beyoncé Knowles), he scooped a bite of creamy lemon mousse from a tuile.
“It’s about telling your story, telling your truth,” said the musician who remains one of the most novelistic artists hip-hop has produced.
He was correct. Narrative drives fashion. Ms. Versace’s is a tale of survival, and in the years since she quit a formidable cocaine habit and dedicated herself to reviving the flagging label, she has moved the company’s story forward shrewdly and with intelligence. The hiring of Alexandre Plokhov, the award-winning designer of Cloak, to assist with Versace’s men’s wear business resulted in a collection that not only looked East for design cues but also seemed to take seriously the idea that the future may be chilling in all kinds of ways.
This was made clear not so much by the snug suits as by the somber long coats that looked suitable for a stroll through Gorky Park. Wearing one, a man might experience a feeling opposite that evoked by the Prada collection. He might feel empowered, as Ms. Versace claimed she is whenever she slips on a 31-carat diamond ring given to her by her late brother, Gianni. At any rate, he might feel fortified against the winds of winter and a rapidly cooling economy.
DESPITE an occasional obligatory reference to the failure of the subprime mortgage market, there was little about the shows here to suggest that anyone was suffering the financial jitters. Yet perhaps the sobriety of the Armani show, whose keyword was “regal,” was a cue.
Design surprises were few in an Armani collection built on caution and control. Those are values that made the designer one of Italy’s wealthiest citizens and his brand among the most recognizable in the world. Those are his creative defaults. Thus his show read as the sartorial equivalent of a stop-loss order. The message was risk-averse.
What every guy needs most in his wardrobe in economic times like these, Mr. Armani seemed to be saying, is a solid interview suit. The fellow wearing the clothes Raf Simons presented at Jil Sander, by contrast, had better have a private income, since it is far from likely that anyone wearing one of Mr. Simons’s ingenious suits or coats, needle-punched and printed in a marble pattern with inkjet technology, will ever find a job.
In general, it is considered unchic to bring up gainful employment when the subject is fashion; real-world concerns are not supposed to penetrate this sphere. And while it is exciting to track designers with the kind of scope Mr. Simons has shown in reinventing the Jil Sander brand, sometimes all that ingenuity becomes an end in itself, and the vision goes flat.
And sometimes it seems finely resolved, as in Tomas Maier’s show for Bottega Veneta, perhaps the week’s most satisfying, in which he recast ordinary work gear for the label’s clientele of putative gazillionaires. It is never clear to this observer who the client is for Mr. Maier’s phenomenally costly clothing, but he certainly makes one wish one could afford to join their ranks.
“We were looking at functionality,” the designer explained, as well as the connection between what a man does and what he wears. From the boxy trousers, the taut jackets, the heavy denims and the so-called chore coats, one deduces that Mr. Maier is dressing garage mechanics, albeit those who have hit it big in the lottery.
Mr. Maier’s was a beautiful show and as direct as Alexander McQueen’s was vagrant, and also lyrical. Inspired by a pilgrimage to India, Mr. McQueen said the show was originally intended to have an Argentine pampas theme. Then he decided to embark on a monthlong journey through Kerala and Rajasthan and the remote and lawless state of Bihar — where Mr. McQueen, a Buddhist, visited the place in which Gautama Buddha attained enlightenment — ending up in the isolated mountain kingdom of Bhutan.
The enormous last-minute changes resulted in a collection that wed masterful tailoring to subtle effects created with safety pins and wirework embroidery and that also featured a coat that looked like yeti fur and another that was Mr. McQueen’s rendition of the Bhutanese national costume, the go.
“The design assistants were not too thrilled, I can tell you,” the designer remarked backstage last Saturday evening.
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