MILAN — If 15 months away from live fashion has taught us anything, it is that viewing fashions digitally is as satisfying as pretending to dine by looking through the window of a restaurant.
Yet, as with a good meal consumed with just one’s eyes, it invariably makes you hungrier.
Not everyone agreed with his decision to forgo a show.
In many ways the resumption of shows here — Etro, Armani and Dolce & Gabbana were the bellwethers — and in Paris is a foray into how the future of global fashion is likely to look.
“Live shows are a must,” Alessandro Sartori, the artistic director of Ermenegildo Zegna, said during a preview of his spring 2022 men’s wear show at Zegna headquarters.
“We found that digital helped to broaden and deepen the experience for fashion audiences,” he said.
There’s no telling who that might be, but anyone lucky enough to be in on the action will find that designers were not wasting the downtime cleaning out the sock drawer.
Or they weren’t until Mr. Sartori gave this most workmanlike of garments a makeover, turning it into modular tailored elements that read as connected, and that are rendered — like sartorial trompe l’oeil — in paper-thin treated calf leather, upcycled vegetal fibers, hemp or abstractly patterned wool jacquard and in colors barely registering as such.
Some of the trickier elements, like adjustable internal belt closures on kimono-style jackets , seemed unfortunate, as did the sling-back sneakers and protective rubber hems on sidewalk-dragging trousers that were wider than Oxford bags.
Offices — getting up and going to one — came to seem like a fairly abstract proposition during the past year-and-change, at least among those of us fortunate enough to be gainfully employed.
Both Miuccia Prada and her collaborator Raf Simons wrote somewhat vaporously in their preshow notes about utopianism, personal freedom and the childlike joy of “going to the beach.” Without wanting to rain on anybody’s holiday fantasy, reality does tend to intrude.
As always, there is often much to admire about the way Ms. Prada, especially, shifts the proportions of clothing to conceal and reveal differing elements of the human form.
Here, the models’ scrawny gams poking out of short pants under boxy jackets felt like a meta-commentary on the shaky construction of gender binaries.
It seems certain the TikTok boys will take to this Prada collection eagerly, just as label fiends will snap up the bucket hats with dipped brims resembling vintage tattoo flash.
For Walter Chiapponi, the designer of Tod’s, realignment of that reality made for a bracing starting point.
Mr. Chiapponi claimed as his inspiration the playboy adventurer Peter Beard and, indeed, pointed to an obligatory mood board pinned with images of the industrious photographer and diarist who, while far from as being as hereditarily rich as both his obituaries and legend had it, never toiled at a desk job a day in his life.
Duty, rather than freedom, was on Giorgio Armani’s mind this season, as he led an industry he helped create out of the pandemic.
Fantasy was in short supply in Milan this week, unless you counted the acid trip patterns and Emerald City palette of Kean Etro’s delightful show staged live on a dusty, disused rail track in the center city.
As if to remind everyone of how fresh the Armani look once was — in those bygone “American Gigolo” days when all the slouchy, sexy elements of Milanese style was new to the wider world — he reprised it for a group of 80 invited guests.
The balance he struck between finely proportioned trousers, with their slightly dropped crotches, offset by light, tidy silk bombers or unlined jackets spoke of a reinvigorated Armani.