Fashion Goes to the Gym in Milan - Wall Street Journal

Milan

The spring 2014 collections here this week have been full of blingy athletic wear: leather running shorts, sequined track suits, baseball caps and expensively embroidered hoodies.

Face-Off: Prada's portraits are likely to become widely reproduced.

Upscale Hoodie: Marco de Vincenzo tried luxe materials for athletic styles.

Tough Stuff: Galitzine by Sergio Zambon veered away from palazzo pants.

Sporty Leather: Tod's used leather on designs where cotton is the norm.

Put 'Em Up: Pucci showed off boxinginspired apparel.

Seeing Red: Bottega Veneta seemed to shred some looks.

Elegant workout gear isn't the clothing one typically expects from some of the most tailored fashion labels on the planet. A heavyweight boxing belt from Pucci, high-top basketball sneakers from Brunello Cucinelli or a hip-hop baseball cap from Galitzine—no matter how meticulously made—defy the stereotype of demure Italian fashion. Which, of course, is the point.

Milan was at pains to present a new side of its fashion culture this week, countering its reputation for discouraging young talent and for lacking the imagination to drive new trends. New support for emerging designers with scholarships and mentoring was announced by several fashion-industry leaders.

With backing from Condé Nast, the week's organizers raised the profile of the events by kicking off with an invitation-only performance at the famed La Scala opera house. Italian tenor Vittorio Grigolo entertained a crowd that included most of Italy's fashion luminaries and executives, such as Prada Chief Executive Patrizio Bertelli, Diesel founder Renzo Rosso, Giorgio Armani, and Tod's owner Diego Della Valle.

"Never before can I remember having all these people together in one room," said Roberta Armani, the company's chief of communications and Mr. Armani's niece.

Over six days of fashion shows, Milan's designers showed their concepts to store buyers and magazines on the third leg of the spring collections tour, which concludes next week in Paris.

Each of these weeks has its own penchants and flavors—New York is trendy, London is daring, Milan is (generally) tailored and conservative, while Paris is overrun with divas. London and Paris are often the drivers of new ideas in fashion, like colorful print-mixing and ladylike silhouettes.

Brooke Jaffe, newly promoted women's fashion director at Bloomingdale's, suggests that pop-culture icons, often seen out in hoodies, are influencing fashion labels. "Designers are enhancing the mundane fabrics of traditional activewear, like sweatshirts, and making them luxe with embellishment, which feels new," she says. "I see this as an important idea for next season."

In addition to the high-end, athletic-inspired fashions on the runways in Milan, we continued to see versions of the white cotton blouse. Those blouses also appeared all over New York's runways. Milan's versions were more experimental—for example, a spectacular white blouse of perforated leather, rather than cotton, from Tod's.

Tod's launched its first apparel collection, designed by Alessandra Facchinetti. Mr. Della Valle (a busy billionaire who has paid almost $34 million toward the renovation of the Coliseum in Rome) announced that apparel is the next natural step in the empire he has been building around the driving shoe. Ms. Facchinetti, who has bounced between positions designing for Gucci, Valentino and others, seems to have found her niche at Tod's. Her fun, slightly minimalist designs focused on the house's famous leather. The designer's eyes watered backstage after she showed her first major collection in several years. "I'm just so happy," she said.

Milan's most notable collections came from its pros. At Bottega Veneta, the usually reserved Tomas Maier tacked upholstery-type pleating to dresses in a willy-nilly manner, as though a little girl had played dress-up with the curtains. But under Mr. Maier's oversight, the dresses were graceful. They were also daring and offer an outlet for women who own many varieties of the same old sheath dress.

Miuccia Prada applied portraits of young women to clothing and bags. They were unforgettable and will be reproduced all over come spring. It's a sure bet that fast-fashion outlets will have their own versions by November. But there was another playfully subversive element to the collection—unsexy dresses whose color-block prints gave the false impression that the model had worn her bra on the outside.

Word went round during the week that a collection from little-known Marco de Vincenzo was a must-see on Sunday afternoon. Mr. de Vincenzo has been designing accessories for Fendi under the creative direction of Karl Lagerfeld. True to the vibe in Milan, Mr. Vincenzo included hoodies, a sweatshirt style, and other sport looks—but produced them with luxurious materials and eyelet embroideries and fine pleats that elevated the clothes to dressy looks. His hoodies could be worn to the board room of a creative company, if not an investment bank. He is a new designer worth paying attention to.

His sporty fixation made more sense than Pucci's, where designer Peter Dundas similarly dived into showy running, boxing and other athletic looks. Whatever Pucci stores carry on their racks come spring, it's a good bet it won't be large quantities of the boxing belts, which seemed more for show than reality.

Write to Christina Binkley at christina.binkley@wsj.com

A version of this article appeared September 24, 2013, on page D3 in the U.S. edition of The Wall Street Journal, with the headline: The Year Milan Runways Resembled Gyms.

via fashion - Google News http://news.google.com/news/url?sa=t&fd=R&usg=AFQjCNGZdurKCNbMZbMsDeGclJZA2hy0Lw&url=http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052702303759604579095231686522424.html