One of the tests of a great fashion brand is how its clothes look off the runway, on regular people — not celebrities paid to wear the clothes, or models styled in the clothes, but fans who most likely put their money where their taste was, bought a piece, and wear it as they want.
So it was instructive that before the Diesel show on Wednesday a host of otherwise anonymous attendees in various versions of designer Glenn Martens’ shredded, lasered and otherwise altered denim were wandering around the cavernous show space taking selfies and looking not just cool or confident (though they did look that), but original.
It’s a bit of alchemy, being able to transform the familiar into an unexpected object of desire; to make you see something that you think you know in a new light. That’s the promise of fashion. And at a time when a lot of the everyday has turned unrecognizable in an alienating way, it’s nice to be reminded that such an experience can actually be a beautiful, even revelatory, thing.
So far it’s happened twice in Milan. Both at Diesel, where after the selfie-taking had been satisfied, the lights went up on an entirely inventive, irreverent view of not just the basics, but the classics, and at Marni, where Francesco Risso held his show amid 75 bistro tables, around which he riffed on the building blocks of wardrobe.
That both brands are part of Renzo Rosso’s Only The Brave group may be a coincidence, but may also be a reflection of what happens when designers are allowed to start taking risks, when they let their imaginations go.
To, in the case of Marni, some sort of sci-fi supper club, full of hybrid cocktail concoctions of pony skin and silk satin and faux fur spliced artfully together. Of what looked like neat Crombie wool coats from the front that had been pinched into giant cocoon curves at the back, sometimes adorned with good luck rabbit’s feet supersized into lapels.
Shirts had the buttons pulled just slightly askew and transformed into the curving stem of a flower, which bloomed at the breast pocket, just as the top of a bias-cut fishtail gown unfurled into petals both poisonous and playful. One crimson suit had a beaded black wolf crawling around the side; a tweed version was festooned with an enormous painted tulip. Tracee Ellis Ross wore a gold silk gown split by a lightning bolt, and looked delighted.
If real life can seem like Mars, this was what you might want to wear swanning around on Venus.
Or, in Mr. Martens’ case, what might happen if “Coco Chanel went to Balmoral and got drunk with the Queen,” as the designer said in a preview. He was kidding, but given that he, along with pretty much every other designer in the world, had been interested in the Chanel job when it was open, it wasn’t entirely a joke. It was a signal to expect reinvention.
Not just of the venue, which had been covered in more than six miles of white drop cloth that had been graffitied by 7,000 volunteers from around the world, or of the giant inflatable sex doll at its center, upcycled from Mr. Martens’ second Diesel show and likewise covered in graffiti. But also of houndstooth, that most traditionally establishment of fabrics, rendered in denim jacquard, cut into collarless jackets and strapless frocks, and then lasered and otherwise eroded to suggest both burial and resurrection, destruction and creation.
Then of the bouclé tweed twin set, transformed into a trio set by chopping what seemed like classic jackets into multiple interchangeable parts (a bolero, a corset, a skirt so abbreviated it was really a wide belt) and then put back together so everything moved in an independent, slinky-like way, making the waist — or really, the area just below the waist and just above where things get dangerous — an erogenous zone unto itself.
Leather was washed until it crimped into pseudo-ruffles; denim, plasticized so it glowed; and backless redefined by false front shirts stuck onto the torso with Band-Aid-like tape, courtesy of a medical device company. A-line skirts were belted at the upper thigh and hung from a legging-like waistband. Ditto bumster trousers, a winking nod to Alexander McQueen and another bit of fashion history, which were slung so low they appeared to flirt with indecency — though they came with integral straps to keep them in place. It was a gimmick, but a clever one.
After all, whether you ever want to wear the pants or not, combining security and subversion is an enticing idea.
