At 10 o’clock on Friday morning, the crematorium at Père Lachaise Cemetery in Paris will consign Claude Montana’s mortal remains to ash. It’s a sad end to a story whose extremes of triumph and tragedy feel like they belong to another time, another place, a fashion industry we scarcely recognise.

But the conspicuous squandering of tremendous talent will always resonate throughout our industry and every other industry that employs extravagantly talented, deeply flawed people. Sure, money talks louder than ever, but if it’s a story you’re after, wouldn’t you rather listen to Lee McQueen’s? Or John Galliano’s? Or Claude Montana’s?

In the late 70s, Montana re-defined French fashion with his linebacker silhouettes cut from black leather, fearless in the face of accusations of fashion fascism. In the 80s, he softened the shoulder, perfected a cut so precise that it left even the master Yves Saint Laurent so breathless he insisted Montana was the only designer he could ever imagine taking over his house.

Montana always represented fashion in its most distilled form, sculpted minimalist purity. But at the same time, he was unhinged by his quest. Bobby Butz, who lived with Claude for 15 years, remembers him torturing himself after every show. “Was it too simple? It could never be too simple. That’s what he was afraid of. He wasn’t going to do little shift dresses. People didn’t come to him for that.”

The consummate irony of Montana’s story is that, while his professional life was a quest for purity, his private life was a mess of drugs, drink and degradation, culminating in his wife Wallis’s suicide in 1996. Butz had already given up a year earlier and gone home to New York to protect his own sanity. “A bad story, but probably a really good movie,” he acknowledges wearily.

Montana marked everyone who came close. Stephen Jones made his hats for 17 years, from 1985 onwards, all the women’s and men’s collections plus the five seasons of haute couture that he designed for Lanvin in the early 90s, the years that Jones considers the pinnacle of Montana’s career. “Each meeting was a lesson in geometry and precision of cut, the like of which I had never experienced,” Jones says now.

He arrived as the designer was establishing his own modern New Look, following on from the exaggerated drama of the early years that shaped his reputation. “The hats were showpieces, discreet, mannered accents, sometimes just a line, like an Antonio [Lopez] drawing, reduced to absolute simplicity.” Sometimes they weren’t even hats. “It being the 80s, Claude liked a big hairdo so hats didn’t always fit. But he was incredibly faithful. He would say, ‘I’m not really feeling hats but I would love you to make something to go with this… I’m doing a section in aubergine, what’s the most beautiful aubergine you can think of?’ I’d say, ‘Shiny’ and he’d say ‘Show me something.’” So Jones would end up making bodices, backpacks, collars, jewellery. He recalls nights when Linda, Yasmeen and Christy would wait patiently while Montana fitted a jacket to them, or draped them in a bodysuit embroidered by the maestro Lesage to flow like sand.

Each meeting was a lesson in geometry and precision of cut, the like of which I had never experienced.

Statuesque blonde Christine Bergström remembers her own “five divine years” working with Montana as a fit model and as one of the most fabulous of his imperious catwalk queens. “We were very close in a work way, because the work was so demanding, we couldn’t be best friends as well. When I worked for Azzedine [Alaïa], I’d just stand in bare feet and he’d sew the dress on me. But with Claude, it was full hair and makeup. You’d pose in high heels in front of a huge mirror and when you were doing the fitting, he’d literally walk next to you and pose, almost the way you were supposed to pose. It was incredibly camp.”

You might wait anything up to two hours for the privilege, but anyone who had the good fortune to experience one of his shows in his late 80s/early 90s heyday appreciated the power of the pose for Montana. His groups of Amazons moved at a glacial pace. At the end of the catwalk, they would assume a position… and hoooooold it. “There was a sense of drama, you couldn’t just slouch down the runway,” Bergström remembers. “And it was all staged by Claude himself. Every girl had fittings of everything. There was nothing last minute. He had a very precise idea of how he wanted his clothes to be shown.”

And he generated his own star system. Irish model Aly Dunne, who could re-articulate her limbs like a startling hybrid of human being and praying mantis, is now one of Malibu’s most successful real estate agents. The wondrous Claude Heidemeyer seems to have vanished off the face of the earth, a fate which would suit her supernatural beauty. And Betty Lago, perhaps the ultimate Montana model, died in her hometown Rio at the age of 60 in 2015.

Montana’s precision also found expression in his distinctive use of colour. From 1991 till 1999, Karin Gruber worked with Montana, initially as a colourist and textile designer. She managed to make the transition from his arch rival Thierry Mugler. (Jones wasn’t so lucky. Mugler closed the door on him forever the day he agreed to also make hats for Claude.) Gruber worked on Lanvin with Montana, and, nearly 20 years later, found herself in exactly the same studio working on Lanvin with Alber Elbaz. “I could see he was using Claude’s couture collection from 1991/92, the tailoring with the integrated jewellery, as inspiration. He loved the way it worked. It was a very strong moment for him, but I think it was difficult for him too, because I was there and he knew what we had done, where we bought the fabric. He was a little bit intimidated.”

After leaving Montana, Gruber also worked with Tom Ford at Saint Laurent. Her experiences with Mugler, Ford and Elbaz, among others, highlighted one of Montana’s major shortcomings. “He didn’t have a global vision about a collection or a show. His team was a real family, the 15 or so people he had around him, and he trusted them. He waited for their proposals. How are we going to arrange the hair, the makeup, the accessories? He was very focused on the clothes. When he had fittings, he knew exactly what he wanted. But the hair, the makeup people, we’d be waiting for him for hours. There were times when he wouldn’t show up at all. You never know when people who take drugs are going to wake up. Sometimes, it really wasn’t easy. But when he was doing a fitting, it was incredible. It was not 1 mm; it was a fraction of 1 mm. More precise than Mugler, but no global vision.”

Bobby Butz agrees. “It was just about the moment, making fashion, making it perfect. At the beginning, there were just five of us putting on those shows. Claude never had that huge vision.” Unfortunately, he also insisted on running his company, and he was, from all accounts, a terrible businessman. Monsieur Rouet, who had helped Christian Dior with his licences, tried to do the same thing with Montana, but the closest he came to the pivotal role played by, say, Pierre Bergé in the career of Yves Saint Laurent was his communications director Béatrice Paul, who struggled to keep her head while all around were losing theirs. By 1994, she’d had enough. When she quit, it was the beginning of the long death of Montana’s business: the sale and resale of the company, the loss of his name, the last sad show in 2002.

“His high point was Lanvin at the beginning of the 90s,” says Jones. “I was actually with him when he went to meet the managing directors of Beecham Pharmaceuticals in London. They owned the Lanvin perfume licence at the time and, by extension, Lanvin. They wanted him to do couture and ready-to-wear and he told them no designer could design two ready-to-wear collections — his own and Lanvin’s — at the same time. To do the best job, you have to give all your energy to one collection. I remember him saying in the car on the way back, ‘It’s just not possible for a designer to do it.’ Look at Tom and YSL, John and Dior, Lee and Givenchy. Claude was right in a way.”

In five seasons of designing couture for Lanvin, Montana went from being slammed (Suzy Menkes’s eviscerating review of his first collection for the International Herald Tribune set the tone) to being praised to the heavens. (He won the Golden Thimble for best couture collection two seasons in a row). But he was fired over his non-negotiable refusal to design ready-to-wear for Lanvin. It wasn’t because he was $50 million over on costs. “He was given an unlimited budget,” Jones insists. And it had nothing to do with alleged abuse of staff. Bobby Butz steams at the idea. “I will tell you one thing about Claude. He treated the ateliers so incredibly, he couldn’t have been nicer and more respectful to Lanvin’s and his own.”

“His whole thing was never to sell out, to be true to his aesthetic,” Butz continues. “In 1980, there was an offer on the table out of New York for 30 pairs of jeans for $30 million, and he wouldn’t do it because that would mean he was selling out. He was always afraid to go out and become, I don’t know, another Halston or something awful. He stayed true to himself, and it hurt him.”

Also hurting him, Butz suggests, was Montana’s relationship with the press. He never courted them. Awkward to a fault, he was an awful interview, and he maintained that his obligatory appearance at the end of a show made him feel stripped to the bone under hundreds of judgmental stares.

After Wallis Franken Montana’s suicide in May 1996, the subsequent media coverage of Montana’s presumed complicity in his wife’s demise was enough to result in a cancellation so comprehensive that neither Montana nor his career really recovered. “Shockingly so, because he still had a huge talent,” Jones says. Immediately after his death, journalist Dana Thomas published a piece on Substack that she had originally written for The New Yorker in 1996. Then-editor Tina Brown killed the story when Vanity Fair scooped them with Maureen Orth’s account of Wallis’ last days. Both articles painted a grim picture of a vibrant but fragile woman driven to kill herself by her husband’s abuse.

Thomas’ decision to publish so soon after Montana died reanimated the cancellation by casting a dark shadow over all the postmortem appreciations. It’s clearly rankled Montana’s faithful few. “There’s been so much crap written about Claude and Wallis,” Jones hisses. “They were absolutely best friends, she was completely inspirational to him, and they adored each other. I thought Dana’s piece was hugely inaccurate. Claude and Wallis were in love. It was an unhealthy love, but they forgave each other for their shortcomings. I think they were both in their own ways quite destructive people, but one was not worse than the other. In a way, you could almost say they saved each other, because even through darkness they understood each other, and sometimes, not always, were compassionate with each other.”

“Their relationship was very honest,” Gruber agrees, “but it was totally destructive. I liked Wallis but she was totally lost.” When Bergström heard about Wallis’ death, she thought it could just as easily have been Claude, or his sister Jacqueline. “I was kind of the fourth wheel, I spent a lot of time with them. But they were in a spiral, the three of them. None of them was good. I was close to Jacqueline as well, but it just got out of hand.”

So what went so terribly wrong? Everyone agrees that cocaine was a key factor. Bergström remembers a time when Montana didn’t even drink. “He was far too sensitive. But it was all or nothing for him. When he started taking drugs, he just went mad.” She assumes it was a kind of self-medication for something buried deep and dark in his past that came back to haunt him. Aside from his sister, there was no blood family to speak of in his life, or even in his death. Others point to a profound melancholy that seemed to preclude true happiness.

For the past few decades, Montana lived as a recluse in his apartment near the Louvre. Occasional sightings, often with him in a state of disrepair, earned him the sobriquet “The Phantom of the Palais Royale.” In 2008, he was brutally mugged by a hustler and spent almost a year in hospital. Jacqueline was his principal carer, but, after she died four years ago, Karin Gruber and another Montana/Mugler alumna Isabelle “Zaza” Monzini became the designer’s lifeline.

Last October, when it became clear that he was no longer capable of looking after himself in his second-floor walk-up, he was institutionalised. There have been reports that he was in the grip of Alzheimer’s disease. Gruber disputes that. “He could remember everything from his work. Surrounded by photos of his shows, he could recognise each photo, each model, each season. He could tell stories about the fittings, the fabrics.”

In the institution, Montana started to sketch again. (His last sketch was reproduced on the back cover of the memorial programme). Over Christmas, he fell and was hospitalised. “The last time he spoke to us about his professional life, he remembered the good things,” says Gruber. “But I think he accepted that sometimes he didn’t make the best decisions, and he was not very helped by the people around him to escape from drugs and alcohol.”

Montana’s memorial service two weeks after his death was conducted in the Oratoire de Louvre, ironically the same place where his rival Thierry Mugler had his send-off. (They were both Protestant). Mahler’s 5th Symphony opened the service, Diana Ross’s “Ain’t No Mountain High Enough” closed it. There were 200 attendees: ex-fashion directors at Le Figaro, Jack Lang, the former Minister of Culture, now in his mid-80s, Béatrice Paul, Bergström, Gruber, Zaza Monzini and other people from the studio, 25 years on. “There really was a Montana clan, like the Halsonettes,” says Jones. In fact, when Gruber and Monzini visited Montana in hospital just before he died, he greeted them with a cry of, “Ah, the Montanettes.” The gathering was on the small side for such a significant figure. Nevertheless, Jones insists, “People were remembering wonderful times. There’s been so much bad printed about Montana that this really was a celebration of his huge talent.”

The last chapter compounds everything that has come before. No family members were at the memorial. The loyalists from Montana’s studio covered the costs. In December, the contents of his apartment — art, furniture, memorabilia (including a dozen pairs of handcuffs) — were sold at auctioneers Drouot to provide for his institutional care. The sale was unpublicised. It reaped a meagre $225,887, nearly $100,000 under the low estimate. PR maven Lucien Pagès bought the documents de travail, the work books for every collection from 1978 to 1999, including Lanvin couture, and 142 videotapes which cover every collection — women’s and men’s — between 1980 and 1998. He intends to have them digitised and will then donate them to one of Paris’ fashion museums.

But million dollar questions dangle. What happened to all of Montana’s money? Where are his archives? Bergström believes they were in a storage unit. “But the unit is empty. Maybe it wasn’t paid for. The clothes just disappeared. So much leather, fur, incredible innovations in knitwear just gone. And while there’s none of that it’s very hard for him to exert any kind of influence over people now. People need to see things, touch things.”

Another question: every time there’s a huge shoulder on the catwalk, there’s usually a mention of Montana but, given his decade-straddling importance, why has no one ever attempted to resuscitate his brand, especially when so many others, including his immediate peers Mugler, Alaïa and Gaultier, have had a successful second life?

Lack of access to any substantial physical legacy might be one reason. The cancellation is another possibility. “Bad juju,” Butz calls it. Then there’s the thought that he might just have been so completely of his time that there is no room for him in the modern world. His influence has filtered through, in the work of huge fan Lee McQueen, for example, or Riccardo Tisci or Joseph Altuzarra, but maybe there’s no longer a place for his brand of obsessive perfectionism.

Meanwhile, as we ponder that imponderable, Karin Gruber and Zaza Monzini will be at Père Lachaise on Friday, loyal to the end. “We can’t leave Claude on his own,” sighs Gruber. “It feels like we are still with him.”

PARIS — The Balenciaga invitation arrived with a QR code which activated two hours before showtime on Sunday. It was a voicemail from Demna in which he recited a manifesto. Key point: if luxury is defined by rareness, then creativity, which is also rare, must be a new form of luxury. Hard not to think of that when we walked into the show venue, a massive tent at Les Invalides, to be seated under a ceiling of blue sky, with sunshine casting shadow across walls panelled with concrete. It was just an electronic illusion, of course, but, for one magic moment, spirits soared, after two weeks of constant rain and lowering skies in Milan and Paris. Is that the power of AI? The concrete panels subsequently yielded during the show to visions of glorious fields, mountains and streams, which transitioned to the neon frenzy of a city by night, a frantic hellscape of TikTokers, a bleached-out forest of pixels, and, finally, a blizzard of static. An overload of content. All life gone.

Demna is drawn to dystopia. His designs elevate a grab-bag of what’s left after nothing. “Fashion on the edge,” he called it during a preview which was such a fluid, articulate performance it was more the art of the preview.  “If it’s not on the edge, it’s a scam.” And yet he was in an exceptionally good mood. Over the past year, he’s managed to purge toxicity from his life. The pre-fall show in Los Angeles in December was a ray of light for him after the relentless threat of cancellation following the accusations of the previous year. LA was a parade of Balenciaga’s greatest bits, all linear, no lateral, but it clicked Demna back into gear, and allowed him to have a lot of fun with his latest.

He loves the old upside down and started the show with the traditional finale of evening wear. A hand-embroidered gown featured a hipline built out with shoulder pads. “Hip-aulettes,” he called them. “What’s good taste or bad taste?” he wondered, before deciding there’s no such thing and sending a full-length faux fur coat with matching skirt down the runway. They’d been treated with resin to give them an aged, not particularly appealing look. That’s one of Demna’s most winning traits. He doesn’t really care if something looks “good,” which frees him up to make things look “interesting.” Like the dress composed of three shirts stacked one on top of the other, with the sleeves knotted round the waist. Or his update of Cristóbal Balenciaga’s “La Vareuse,” flipping a pair of jeans upside down so that the crotch became the collar, and the legs became the sleeves.  Demna’s personal favourite was a long dress made up of four t-shirts laid vertically and stitched together. It was ingenious upcycling but it was also typically perverse in its combination of t-shirt messages. True, the irony of Demna’s ideas occasionally touches on mockery.

Much less bamboozling was the fluid, structureless tailoring in viscose – jacket, pants, shirt and tie. “It’s a difficult thing to modernise,” Demna said. “But I want to see people under 30 wearing a suit.” The shoe he suggested as an accessory was Wicked-Witch-pointy. It also folded so it could fit in your pocket if necessary.  Balenciaga covers all bases.

The models chewed gum and had tattoos and rings through their noses, when they weren’t Isabeli Fontana, Maggie Rizer, Esther Cañadas and Tasha Tilberg, supermodels on the comeback trail. They wore dresses collaged from bras, hoodies and knapsacks, or outfits tightly sellotaped to the body. Demna hates hats but he offered the new Balenciaga beanie, which pulled all the way down over the eyes,“to protect yourself from an avalanche of content.” The star of the accessories was something he called a “bag with attitude,” a huge, Birkin-like thing. “Balenciaga has no logo,” Demna explained. “It’s a word with many letters that I cannot fit on a bag. So I have to put an attitude into it to make it identifiable.” There was also a face-wrapping visor, quite fabulous bar the slightly impaired vision, and already locked up in pre-orders.

Which begged the question: how do people actually feel about Balenciaga now? There has certainly been no diminution in the creativity or the ironic wit. There’s still the odd frisson that comes from someone being allowed to get away with all this under the august name of fashion’s greatest designer, paid for by a huge fashion conglomerate to boot. And yet I’m kind of wondering, what more can Demna do to win back the love? Is he wondering too? It’s that blizzard of static that stayed with me.

Balenciaga Autumn/Winter 2024

PARIS — Seán McGirr’s debut show at Alexander McQueen, one of the season’s most anticipated shows, was inevitably one of its most controversial, because Lee McQueen himself was the biggest most of all: the most significant designer of modern times. Since his death in 2010, his legacy has been nurtured and enhanced by his right hand Sarah Burton who has made the brand a byword for exquisite craft. As the first “outsider” to be unleashed on that legacy, 35-year-old McGirr was confronted with a formidable task that may be thankless, initially at least, if the fury of Saturday night’s keyboard warriors is any gauge. He seemed to be anticipating as much in a preview last week when he quoted Lee’s own response to criticism: “I’d rather people hated what I do than not give a shit about it.” But, taking a longer, more rational view, McGirr’s debut pretty much realised his own ambition, which was to bring McQueen back to its raw urban roots, when Lee was still mastering his craft, before all the spectacles, when the extravagance was still purely emotional.

The location — a cold, damp, concrete husk of a building almost an hour’s drive from the centre of Paris — certainly set the tone there. So did McGirr’s moodboard, with its images of McQueen’s earliest shows “Banshee” and “The Birds.” A piece from the latter — the famous clingfilm dress — was the starting point. “What was Lee trying to say?” McGirr wondered. The twisted simplicity of the look, its “compression,” registered with him as something ineffably modern and new. So he opened the show with his own version, a fitted, draped tube of laminated jersey. Garbage bag rather than clingfilm.

McGirr was entranced by McQueen’s smash’n’grab iconoclasm, the way, for instance, he ran dirty old tires over the tailoring in “The Birds” to break it down. His response to that was a T-shirt and a dress built round smashed windshields from a car dealership in Dagenham. Another dress of broken crystal featured a hectic effect created by the incorporation of shattered tail lights. There were also skirts and shirts cut from a black silk nylon that was intended to duplicate tarpaulin. Improvising with industrial detritus, with found objects, felt “very London” to McGirr. For one look, he found an old mesh toile from the 90s that had never been used and “trapped” it in layers of tulle.

McGirr never met McQueen, but he has an instinct for his ghosts. The urgency of the models reminded me a bit of Laura DePalma, whose fierce, confrontational walk in those early shows was an unforgettable extension of Lee’s own attitude. There was an echo of an East End gangster or two in the men’s broad-shouldered leather coats, tightly bound (more “compression” at the waist, with broad-brimmed hats. The attenuated tailoring also harked back to Lee’s own obsession with razor-sharp precision, though McGirr developed his own stacked (even more “compression”) shoulder.  The fact that the razor was a little on the blunt side here drove the naysayers into a frenzy, but that’s the kind of kink that McGirr should be able to work out with time.

Speaking of kink — integral to the McQueen aesthetic — McGirr brought fetishistic flourishes of his own. There was a sling link in a necklace and a bag handle. Biceps were compressed by metal cuffs designed by Lee’s jeweller Shaun Leane, hoof-like footwear sprouted mini-horse’s tails. Closest to the core of peculiarity were the looks that closed the show. His father is a mechanic in Ireland so there was a lot of car talk around the house when McGirr was growing up.  He created three metal dresses in black, Aston Martin yellow and Lamborghini blue. Cars this time, instead of car tires: McQueen via J.G. Ballard. Though there were no skulls, no tartan, no courting of the clichés, the notorious bumster trousers got a revamp in the shapely form of a couple of “bum” dresses, which sculpted  the rear end of Michelangelo’s David from shearling and tufted wool and mounted it on tulle and a rib-knit jumper.

Lee McQueen was one of the late, legendary Professor Louise Wilson’s star students at Central Saint Martins. Sean McGirr was one of her students in the last year she taught at CSM. I thought of her when he marched out his massive cocoons of knitwear, ten tonnes of hoodie, played down by pairing with grey flannel trackies or a denim skirt. They perfectly embodied “the rough drama” that McGirr craved.  It was a key element of Lee’s own beginnings, and if that suggests a fundamental compatibility, I’m happy. Because the connection truly is there, if those keyboard warriors care to step back from their fashion politicking and give the new standard bearer a chance.

Alexander McQueen Autumn/Winter 2024

MILAN — Matthieu Blazy imagined the set of his latest presentation for Bottega Veneta as a burned landscape, with huge blooming cacti sculpted from Murano glass representing the resilience of life and beauty in a living hell.  

“When there is nothing left, you try to make something out of yourself,” Blazy said after the show. “Dressing brings us dignity, makes us human.” That veiled comment on the current state of the world inspired a huge collection that Blazy intended as an elevation of the everyday. What people do to get by. “There was something beautiful in the idea of making it monumental.”

And yet it wasn’t scale that stood out so much as directness and simplicity. In his three years at Bottega, Blazy has made a name for himself as an alchemist, spurring the brand’s remarkable ateliers on to feats of transformative ingenuity. Here, he insisted the aim was reduction. No flannel shirt made from leather this time. Nothing — or no one — pretending to be something they’re not. Instead, cotton was cotton, leather was leather. There was no embellishment, less technique. “Reduction, but to the maximum,” said Blazy. One gorgeous effect was achieved with nothing more than fabric on a dress or skirt bunched and buttoned. The plissé pleating of a pale yellow top opened into flares of sunset orange. A t-shirt dress burst phoenix-like into a ball of fiery red fringe.  Outerwear was stripped of detail but it was emphatic in its silhouettes, with oversized, rounded sleeves. Blazy dropped a broad-shouldered sweater to mid-calf. That was reductio ad elegantia.

“Elegance is resilience,” he insisted. His equally elegant version of a classic trench had storm flaps which anticipated a hurricane.

One particularly beautiful bias-cut dress featured a dense scribble print which was actually a composite of thousands of passport stamps. Blazy called it a “memory” print. In the show, it was followed by an outfit woven with fine stripes, like the lines in a notebook. The idea of writing suggested hope for the future to the designer, “what can still be written.” I know he intended resilience, but it was also a reminder of what’s been lost to the all-consuming flames. That was the constant subtext — fire, ash, carbon black — that loaned a meditative melancholy to the show. So much we know, so little we can do. And yet people continue, burned to the ground, springing back to beautiful life, stronger than ever. Blazy’s hope.

Bottega Veneta Autumn/Winter 2024

Once, you could have reasonably attached a state of meditative melancholy to Luke and Lucie Meier’s revisioning of Jil Sander, but, as Lucie said on Friday, they’ve grown bolder with the years. “Cleaner and more colourful,” she added when she was asked to describe the new collection. And there was Mariacarla Boscono as proof, opening the show in a vermilion red suit with a raglan shoulder, bold, precise, definitely colourful.

Like any thinking people this season, the Meiers have been attempting to reconcile their work and the world. Luke talked about the feeling of being surrounded, immersed in something, and that was the sense they wanted to get across. Mk.gee, a musician they love, played live during the show, enveloping the audience in sound. Many of the models wore black skullcaps which encased their heads. And then the clothes themselves wrapped bodies in an over-abundance of quilted fabric, like protective blankets.

The show took place in a space described as a capsule. It underscored a sci-fi tinge in the Meiers’ work which was only stronger with their latest collection. The stately volumes, the quilted capes and full-sleeved tunics worked as the wardrobe of an intergalactic aristocracy. The metal fringing which shimmered round necklines and down side seams added a space cowboy flourish. Those odd black skullcaps suggested Vulcans, the shaggy slippers called to our inner Wookie. (The Meiers weren’t the only designers in Milan to propose the Wookie foot for Winter ‘24.) For terrestrials, the new emphasis on sleeker tailoring held much more promise.

Jil Sander Autumn/Winter 2024

If Matthieu Blazy and the Meiers were in their own ways responding to the future, Giorgio Armani headed in the other direction, back to his roots. It wouldn’t be surprising if he’s been brooding on the past. In December, his Silos exhibition space opened an exhibition dedicated to the work of Aldo Fallai, the photographer who was responsible for sealing the Armani aesthetic for posterity in the ad campaigns he shot during the seventies and eighties. Gina de Bernardo, the model who dominated those campaigns, was first on the catwalk on Monday morning.

Roots mean nature, and Armani went back to the garden with a floral-saturated show that opened in the dusky golden hour (even though it was actually morning outside) before shading into twilight and eventually darkest night. A look composed of a cargo pant in washed velvet, with a floral almost-dressing gown, a wide-brimmed embroidered hat and floral slippers had a suggestion of the eccentricity that is Armani’s not so guilty pleasure.  When the soundtrack cooed “anything you can imagine”, you could imagine that there isn’t much that hasn’t crossed Armani’s mind in his half-century in fashion. But the parade of familiar silhouettes, touchable textures and tones took on an edge of magic realism as night fell. Lustrous jewel-toned duchesse, black velvet sparkling with a swarm of dragonflies, flowers turning luminous, like deep sea creatures, can occasionally seem like incongruities in the grand scheme of sensible Armani things. But they’re as much the man as any of the revolutionary looks that are celebrated in Aldo Fallai’s images.

Giorgio Armani Autumn/Winter 2024

MILAN — The little paper sailor hat on every seat at the Moschino show unfolded into shownotes which immediately announced Adrian Appiolaza’s intention “to build a new language from an existing vocabulary.” But the mere weeks he had to create a collection, succeeding Davide Renne whose death, after only ten days in the job, rocked Milan last November, scarcely left Appiolaza with much time for such an ambitious project. So maybe this was more like him familiarising himself with the old language, becoming fluent in it before he starts speaking his own lingo.

And boy, was he fluent! The thought that Franco Moschino might be somewhere smiling over Appiolaza’s debut didn’t seem so outlandish, especially when so many memorable Franco-isms were paraded in a refresher course for those who might only be aware of the brand through Jeremy Scott’s near-decade in charge. Scott’s brand of irony tended to an overload of campy spectacle. Moschino himself was a much more rigorous proposition, dressing up droll satire and an activist frame of mind in Milanese tailoring (even as he poked fun at it). Appiolaza’s years of experience in the industry, most recently as design director of women’s ready-to-wear at Loewe, make him a dream successor in that respect. He calls himself “an obsessive archivist.” With this debut, it was really the lightness of his touch with the legacy that made the greatest impression.

Of course, it helped that so many of Franco’s details are so durably delightful, but Appiolaza owned them, made them look fresh, rather than 35 years old. I was always a sucker for the exclamation marks, the question marks and the polka dots anyway, along with Moschino’s message tees and the endless trompe l’oeil touches. Appiolaza drew on them all, plus the repurposed men’s wardrobe, the trench, boxer shorts, silk pyjamas, ties turned into waistcoats and turbans. The pearl-draped “Chanel” suit got a revisit in waffle knit. PEACE and LOVE, Happy Face and fluffy white clouds drifting in a clear blue sky: Moschino’s original iconography now has other layers of meaning, but whatever happens next, Appiolaza captured his character — and his characters. I’m already looking forward to the next one.

Moschino Autumn/Winter 2024

Francesco Risso insists Marni’s travels aren’t over but after touching down in New York, Tokyo and Paris, he felt the brand’s 30th birthday should be celebrated in Milan. “We’re becoming adults,” he said gleefully. And then he proceeded to show a collection that was child’s play, an extravaganza of deliberate naïvete, an earnest effort to glorify instinct and intuition as a release from the structured thinking he has acquired over his years in fashion.

Risso was motivated by Charlie Porter’s new book “Bring No Clothes,” the title taken from Virginia Woolf’s instruction to her haute bohemian friends on how to dress for a weekend in the country. Come as you are, forget about traditional niceties of dress. Gripped by the idea of a real blank slate, Risso and his team covered everything in their studio, windows included, in white paper. No moodboards, no perspective, no floodtide of digital imagery. Completely detached from that customary comfort zone, “It was the first place our soul came alive,” Risso marveled. Simple creation by pure instinct. Lots of handwork, scribbling, obsessive finger-painting. No need for details or cuts. Like turning a switch off and back on again, Risso agreed, to illuminate an entirely new landscape.

He resists the idea he’s any kind of shaman, but there was a distinctly shamanic tinge to the enterprise, with the tribe of Marni chasing enlightenment behind their fearless leader. The show venue was originally a dark, dirty tunnel, transformed, cleansed, by another covering into a white paper cave. A choir sang.

Those who have followed Marni for the last three decades probably cherish memories of aesthetically pleasing eccentricity (a contemporary version of the haute bohemian patch that was Woolf and Co.’s playground a century ago). Risso’s blank slate produced rather more of a challenge. Marni was always about colour. He talked about “dematerialising colour.” There was a lot of black, cut into stark, geometric, basic, almost 2D shapes. Very little detail, as promised. Instinct manifested itself in animal prints, and outcrops of fur, which made some of the models look like a new species. When the fur was hand-painted, it matted into whorls or peaks of whipped meringue. To these eyes at least, it was the hand-painting that came closest to Risso’s faith in a structureless new vision. Striations of paint were gloriously splurged by hand all over jackets, capes and frocks. Granted, the paint needed the structure of those items of clothing to achieve its effects, but there was never a shaman who thrived without compromise.

I came away thinking of Emma Stone as Bella Baxter in “Poor Things,” negotiating her way back into the human condition by trial and error. Same with Francesco Risso. Nothing ventured, nothing gained.

Marni Autumn/Winter 2024

Donatella Versace’s backdrop was a gleaming white stairway to heaven. To reach it, her models had to traverse a massive expanse of thick-piled black carpet which kicked up a snowdrift of fluff while they walked. It’s hard work getting to heaven. That’s something Donatella knows all too well. Her exceptionally good mood also suggested she knows she’ll make it in the end. Or maybe it was due to the collection she’d just showed. Back when the world had clarity, Donatella was responsible for Versus, the second collection her brother gifted her as a way to keep Versace wired into the rock/pop/punk culture she was naturally drawn to. Versus presentations in New York were as much a gig as a fashion show. That’s how Friday night felt, except that now there’s the artisanship of the atelier’s hands to polish the product.

From the first sheetmetal blast of Siouxsie & the Banshees to the last (you will never again hear the lyrics “Be a carcass … be limblessly in love” at a fashion show, promise), the Versace show was an exercise in Versus edge.  Hair was spiked punkily, eyes were shadowed heavily. There were hole-y knits. And the palette of black, white, red and grey was classic, a punk/power pop hybrid, like the five-button Edwardian jackets on the boys. Though it was actually the ones Donatella made for Prince that dictated the silhouette, wide in the shoulder, suppressed in the waist. The dramatic tweed jacket with the jeweled buttons? That hinted at further inspiration from the Purple One.

The Versace show in LA a year ago was a turning point for Donatella. The precise, powerful tailoring generated rave reviews. Understandably, she’s not about to let it go. “We need courage,” she said during a preview. The broad-shouldered power jacket is a crutch. She went on to show more of the same. Graphic cuts, graphic patterns. The show closed with a couple of tuxedo looks — the boy in black leather thigh boots — that will probably keep her stuck to her power-dressing guns. But, earlier, there were a few sculpted looks with ruched skirts and bustier or portrait necklines that I figured were much more likely to have put the smile on Donatella’s face. Good girls go to heaven. Bad girls go to Versace. With Gigi Hadid in priestly white-collared black silk to offer absolution.

Versace Autumn/Winter 2024

MILAN — “I never want to send messages,” Miuccia Prada said after her latest show with Raf Simons on Thursday, but I guess she just can’t help herself. The collection was so resonant, so bittersweet, echoing hope and dread equally, keen to endorse love and beauty as universal values, simultaneously aware that love and beauty aren’t enough when the grinding gears of history are reducing human beings to nothing. It was a bold, provocative proposition, and the duo showed clothes to match.

Prada and Simons broke history into fragments which they then reconfigured in artful ways. She referenced Walter Benjamin, the German Jewish philosopher who died under the Nazis and has in recent times become eminently, understandably quotable. It’s not conservative to take something from the past, it’s liberating it from its cage. The collection drew recognisable bits and pieces from all over: tweedy Edwardian tailoring, sinuous ‘20s slips, an haute couture trapeze coat and a varsity jacket, military garb, bloomers and a biker jacket, and all sorts of dramatic feathered headgear.

Just check what Rianne Van Rompaey was wearing. From the front, she was sporting an enormous cuffed trouser leg, worn as an apron. From the back, she was wearing an iceblue silk slip, the apron tie resolving itself in an extravagant rosette. Her black turtleneck offered some rational respite before we came to a Ruritanian policeman’s cap in crushed purple velvet. Oh, and there was a sedate little handbag dangling from a Mineshaft-worthy leather buckle. The demure stance Rianne was compelled to adopt to accommodate this accessory was the perfect match for her pointy mid-heeled shoe. Capote Swan incarnate. This was one look. There were 57 more. History rolled over and over into 58 balls.

A unifying factor was the sense of values that underpinned the complexity of the clothing. You have to know and love fashion to distil it down like this. You become aware of the multitude of lives that are lived in clothes. Sounds basic, but it has an enormous emotional weight. Clara Deshayes’s enormous soundtrack cued me into this train of thought. Nico’s version of “My Funny Valentine,” Irma Thomas’s “Anyone Who Knows What Love Is,” emotion-drenched songs interrupted by stentorian blasts of sound, like the soundtrack of “The Zone of Interest,” a movie so devastating that Miuccia and Raf could scarcely speak about their response. It’s scarcely fair — or appropriate — to introduce it here, but if you’ve seen it, you’ll know what I mean about the power of clothing to communicate lives present and past.

At the same time, the fact that a Prada collection can elicit such a response is testament to the brand’s unique personality. Miuccia may have insisted she was message-averse, but, looking out at the world the way it is right now, she could only hope that the work she does inspires with the love that is embedded in its heart. “This was not an easy show to do,” she said. “I put a lot of mental effort into it, but it’s important to produce some goodness.” The show’s staging was stunning: plants, greensward, babbling brook, all of it sealed under glass. Memorialised for one doomed world, or preserved for the next hopeful one?

Democracy may be challenged on many global fronts at the moment but there is one corner of the fashion industry where the essence of the idea is thriving.

Glenn Martens opened Diesel up to the world before his latest show: 72 hours of live streaming every last detail about the preparation of a fashion show, complete transparency in an industry which prefers a veil over its activities. For the show itself, Dieselettes around the world were invited to join online; a thousand people signed up within a minute. They created the digital front row that was the backdrop for Wednesday’s presentation. I’m not sure they were all of this realm. There was at least one full-blown alien. But maybe that’s testament to Diesel’s new reach. Under Martens’ unique and unyielding vision, Diesel has finally begun to click with the universe. Parent entity OTB Group confirmed as much in releasing 2023 results last Friday.

But I wasn’t thinking about cash while I watched the show. Instead, David Bowie’s Diamond Dogs swarmed my brain. More specifically, Future Legend, the album’s grand opening: mutant eyes gazing down on Hunger City, ten thousand peoploids splitting into small tribes, ripping and rewrapping mink and shiny silver fox, family badge of sapphire and cracked emerald…and so it goes. Martens has honed a particular kind of post-apocalyptic vision at Diesel, road warriors and fearless amazons composing a new world from literal shreds of the old, but this time, he glossed it all with a layer of finesse, of elegance. And it was gorgeous.

There were still the survivalists in huge shearling parkas, cropped pants and brutal boots. Some padded coats burst with tufts of electric stuffing. Others looked like they’d been blowtorched to reveal the wadding inside. And there was a new story with men and women dressed like puli dogs in shaggy coats, shrugs, balaclavas, even a tailored skirt suit. Like I said, Diesel now reaches everywhere, even Svalbard.

But the takeaway from the collection was a new level of construction rather than destruction, of finery tailored from tatters. Martens has developed a way to layer fabrics then dissolve them so that what remains is an elusive fusion of what was and what will be. The way that a leopard coat literally evaporated into florals, or an elegant peak-shouldered dress with a fitted, ruched skirt turned into a tattered memory before our eyes was a tribute to whatever extraordinary Frankenstein’s lab that Martens has working at full tilt back at Diesel HQ. The show opened with looks that artfully duplicated sweatstains in armpits and on chests, which made fabric transparent. But by some strange alchemy, the effect was delicate, almost lace-like, rather than EWWW!!!!

However extraordinary they may be, the technical achievements that glossed denim so it took on the appearance of black leather, or gifted it with a deep, velvety pile that exploded into a Wookie ruff, are part of the Diesel repertoire now. It was the chicness of this particular collection that felt new. Like the Diamond Dogs themselves, it was emblematic of a seductively transgressive sophistication. And, if there is any justice in the fashion world, Glenn Martens is a Future Legend in the making.

Diesel Autumn/Winter 2024

Kim Jones has already felt the warmth of that moment when you can move the dial for the whole industry with the fusion of street and salon which originally launched him as a menswear designer. His tenure at Fendi’s womenswear has been marked by sober restraint, lean, elegant, untroubled, with the emphasis on silhouette and fabrication. Maybe too tentative, it was almost like he was over-emphasising his maturity as a designer. And yet there have always been swirls and eddies running under his collections for Fendi, and it might have been the surfacing of those that gave the kick to Wednesday’s show that made it his best yet for the brand.

Jones is a born archivist, a forensic specialist in fashion’s past, and, poking around in the files, he uncovered sketches by Karl Lagerfeld that reminded him of the 1980s in London, an era that Jones is umbilically connected to as a collector of clothes by labels that are now lost in the mists of time. Somewhere between the New Romantics, the utilitarian bent of designers like Willie Brown and Modern Classics and the extravagance of Leigh Bowery, he isolated a common ground with Fendi’s own longtime appetite for mixing tradition and perversity. You don’t need to know much more than this: the Chuba Chups lollipops dangling off the big squishy bags on the catwalk came from Silvia Venturini Fendi’s memory of Italian horror maestro Mario Bava’s 1973 film “Lisa and the Devil,” with Telly Savalas as a lollipop-sucking psycho killer (“How can you turn something so ordinary into something so macabre?” she wondered), while the embroidered dots that decorated filmy chiffon skirts were inspired by Bowery’s designs. (Completists might fancy a deep dive into @trojan_garybarnes.) The first dress — stark, black, shapely — reminded Jones of something his friend Princess Julia might have worn as a shopgirl in Covent Garden’s PX boutique in the 1980s.

But all that would be mere bull’s wool if the collection itself hadn’t had a convincing and very clear point of view. Strong lines seductively softened into rounded shapes. Delfina Deletrez Fendi’s jewellery mixed metal and wood in a similarly potent blend of hard and organic. Her own personal style continues to influence Jones’s approach to the brand, and here it reached a critical mass in trompe l’oeil iterations of her casually draped sweaters which echoed the Japanese influence that was strong in those early 1980s years in London.

Fendi will be 100 years old next year so it was appropriate that the strongest look in the collection should be one that felt like the brand bringing past and future together: a mid-length leather shift topped by a coat stitched with the artisanal selleria technique that has been a Fendi signature since Adele and Edoardo founded the house in 1925, all of it, bag, boots and Chuba Chup included, in a muted but luxurious mulberry monotone. When Kim Jones takes on a brand, he always learns how to speak its language fluently.

Fendi Autumn/Winter 2024

The author has shared a Podcast.You will need to accept and consent to the use of cookies and similar technologies by our third-party partners (including: YouTube, Instagram or Twitter), in order to view embedded content in this article and others you may visit in future.

Subscribe to the BoF Podcast here.

Background:

The delicate dance between artistic integrity and commercial viability is a challenge Dan Levy and Jonathan Anderson know well. Levy’s Emmy Award-winning Netflix show Schitt’s Creek harmonises creative brilliance with mainstream appeal, while at the luxury label Loewe, Anderson’s refreshingly original designs have earned him both critical acclaim and commercial success. What unites their work is a real commitment to personal vision.

“I can’t think of something more heartbreaking than starting with an idea that I loved, allowing people to change it to the point where it loses its DNA, then it goes out into the world and either succeeds or fails, and I have to look at that and say, ‘Well, that’s not me,’” says Levy. “You can never get that back. The fight to protect that [idea] is so important.”

This week on The BoF Podcast, Levy and Anderson speak with BoF editor-at-large Tim Blanks about how they balance creativity and commerce in a conversation from BoF VOICES 2023.

The author has shared a YouTube video.You will need to accept and consent to the use of cookies and similar technologies by our third-party partners (including: YouTube, Instagram or Twitter), in order to view embedded content in this article and others you may visit in future.

Key Insights:

• “Schitt’s Creek” began as a bare-bones-budget Canadian production and became a worldwide sensation during the pandemic. “We went and made something with absolutely no outside opinions, and because the stakes were so low, we were able to really kind of make the show for ourselves,” he says. “So what we made was quite pure.”
• Through his work at Loewe and his namesake label, Anderson has realised that designers can’t be afraid of backlash. “Sometimes you have to make the decision that you may have to give the audience what they don’t want to annoy them. Because there’s nothing better when people are annoyed because then they think.”
• For both creatives, the pandemic was a watershed moment. Anderson recalls, “it destroyed every formula that there ever was,” whilst Levy explained, “it also gave the consumer or the audience the freedom to find what they liked.”
• To find creative success, Anderson puts it simply: “I think for something to be successful, you have to give everything you have.”

Additional resources: