Love and Its Owners

Near the closing exit of Sylvia Venturini Fendi’s latest menswear show, lights dimmed while the soundtrack briefly transitioned into an aria. For a few seconds, an isolated minimal sound resembled an angel’s echo, serving to heighten what Fendi offered men who actually care about real fashion: an elevated pitch.

What Fendi succeeded with — a genuine fashion message — was a challenge most top Milan shows bungled, meeting no desirable destination besides blah. Sylvia Fendi however, twisted — in tandem with soundscape producers Nico Vascellari and Rocco Rampino — an amalgam of something dramatic yet precise, resulting in the propulsive sound of what didactic menswear should feel like.

Alber Elbaz once said ‘Fashion is not about before or after, it is about now, the well-made. It is about functionality.’ Referencing a bucolic theme, Fendi set about grounding this genius Elbaz quote as a 2024 menswear bible. Fendi shifts proportions frequently. Here, we saw long outerwear overhang longer-seeming trousers and kilt culottes (again, the countryside feeling). Yes, canvas jackets, clipped anoraks, lug sole waders and sturdy long coats sound like gorp core excursions. Yet thanks to Fendi’s Byzantine cleverness with contrasts and fabrications, her man will hunt to gather in cobalt or cornflower blue hues of kilts, leather contrast collared polos and also sadly, fur.

All this outdoors-gone-fashion madness recalled another great Milan moment to supernature — Prada womens A/W 09. Gender reversed mores when Mrs. Prada turned masculine codes of fishermen, flannel, leather and country tweeds into a relaxed structure of metropolitan modernity. Sylvia Fendi did something similar by giving mundane proportions a sense of drama.

Fendi represented fashion that seduces. You feel something. It signifies a designer who actually tried and therefore we too, should try a little harder to consider ‘Would I wear it?’ or ‘How would these clothes function in real life?’ At best, Fendi menswear is a crime of passion prodding our Apple wallets. At worst, we got a really nice soundtrack.

Conversely, Jordan Bowen and Luca Marchetto chose to seduce by provocation. Their tools were mystic principles containing darker subversions within JORDANLUCA A/W 24. You could sense the underbelly simply by paying attention. The hair on models — a bit Johnny Thunders actually — were undoubtedly Anthony Turner creations. Turner favours certain imagery. His personal artworks are these Tim Burton-meets-Rob Zombie mashups seemingly drawn by Alice Glass. Another model timely served as the musician Skin’s doppelganger while ‘Secretly’ by Skunk Anansie began to blare. Skin was a Tom Ford favourite in 2003, when Adina Fohlin fronted his YSL campaign. She also walked in this show. Model icons Debra Shaw and Kim Peers, who doubles as a cold wave singer in Skremer, were also cast. All this sullen casting with gloomy make-up by Inge Grognard helped explain the question JORDANLUCA seemed to ask their audience: whose cult and culture is it anyway?

As Luca continued his ongoing tailoring assault onto the kilt, this time into overcoats; as last season’s edgy office workers became this seasons’ disemboweled layabouts who just don’t give a damn anymore (or perhaps Little Edie from Grey Gardens); as JORDANLUCA debuted a shiny, capacious, new handbag you wondered where all this was going.

Our answer was contained in Andreas Kronthaler, designer-turned-model. Luca's first fashion working experience was with Kronthaler’s wife Vivienne Westwood. And then, the JORDANLUCA final runway song began. It was ‘Mad World’ by Gary Jules. A Tears for Fears remake from the film ‘Donnie Darko,’ itself a teenaged commentary on weary, hallucinogen-drenched dystopia. Factoring these outcomes into the JORDANLUCA show did not help ground it in a transcendant way. It meandered in cult posings with spotty styling devoid of speaking to something bigger, which their talent in fusing polar extremes has thrived with lately. The collection did touch greatly on Jordan and Luca’s sincerity with love and intuition, two qualities that can define luxury if you have the muscles for it. And at the rate their clothes have been selling, that is likely the next step.