Fashion Trends & Tours in Italy

Hadley Freeman, Guardian’s deputy fashion and a contributing editor to Vogue, in her “Milan? It’s in the bag” stresses how at Milan menswear shows the biggest players were always more about image than the clothes.
Freeman, writes:

“The majority of the clothes ranged from the ridiculous (trench coats made out of the skins of exotic animals) to the dull (suit, suit, suit) and the press and buyers were talking with relief that at least the Paris shows were still to come. Next to menswear labels such as Junya Watanabe, Comme des Garcons, the very up-and-coming Lanvin and, most of all, Dior Homme - all labels that are innovative but wearable, and so appealing as to be increasingly familiar even to those who don’t read Men’s Vogue - how can the old Italian warhorses compete? The truth is, they can’t. So many of Milan’s biggest players were always more about image than the clothes”

Too much military, 70s, and techno.

The themes of the collections were telling: there was military, for the 18,000th time in the past three years; the 70s (didn’t we have this last year? And last season?); and as soon as a designer decrees that his theme is “techno”, leading to the kind of tin-foil appliques and all-in-one spacesuits the wardrobe assistant for Logan’s Run would have dismissed as silly, you know you are at a show where the designer doesn’t really expect anyone to buy his clothes.

But McQueen, Prada, D&G and Marni were different.

Alexander McQueen, Prada, D&G and Marni all showed very interesting collections, mainly because theirs were the only shows in which the designer seemed to put some thought into the clothes, looking at what men want to wear, what makes a man look better, and at the clothes themselves, rather than….