MILAN — Imagine you’re a fashion designer who’s just been handed an iconic brand to remake/remodel for a challenging future. The road behind is littered with the bruised reputations of the many who’ve folded at the challenge. The road ahead? Well, you could take a good look at the first day of Milan’s show season for Autumn/Winter 2023 to see how your peers are strategising, and take it from there.

It’s exactly two years since Kim Jones showed his first ready-to-wear collection for Fendi. In that time, he’s evolved a different approach to his protean predecessor Karl Lagerfeld, tuning into a calmer, more subtle expression of Roman sophistication. “I know it sounds repetitive,” he said, as he insisted once more that he’s inspired by the wardrobe of Delfina Delettrez, which she has plucked from the closets of her mother Silvia Venturini Fendi. But I guess there’s nothing like going straight to the source, especially when it yields a colour palette as striking as this new collection’s shades of pale blue and bitter chocolate, an unlikely but cool combination. Also reflective of the Fendi women: the knitwear, and the menswear-iness of the tailored coats and trousers. “Looking at the sophisticated Fendi woman in quite a simple way,” was how Jones put it.

He’s a canny one. The women’s collections Silvia Fendi designed on her own before he started work for the house gave him invaluable insights into what she identified as Fendi’s signatures. First and foremost, there was a bourgeois-with-a-twist element. That dovetailed with Lagerfeld’s sensibility, so there was always a perverse subtext somewhere in the collections, for both women and men. You could see Jones nodding to that with his first look, a pale blue cardigan paired with a black leather skirt and boots that brought to mind the dominatrix looks designed by Lagerfeld for the 1975 movie Maîtresse. Silvia referred to them in her Autumn/Winter 2020 collection. Maybe Jones was picking up on them now, the same way he also picked up on the languor of the last collection Silvia was responsible for before he came on board. The lean elongation of his knit dresses was emphasised by a single stripe, stem to stern, recalled from Fendi via Lagerfeld circa 1996.

Jones himself is also quite partial to a perverse subtext. Here, there were second-skin tops that duplicated in micro-pleated silk an ultra-acrylic top that Vivienne Westwood designed for Let it Rock, her first shop in 1971. “I’m probably the only person that’s got that,” beamed collector Kim. Westwood has obviously been on everyone’s minds of late, but Jones claimed he never stops thinking about her.  Which made me wonder about the kilts clipped over pants in this collection. That was the look that garbed the most gorgeous manifestations of Westwood’s warrior punks in the heyday of her King’s Road mecca Seditionaries.

But Fendi has also borne Jones into the upper echelons of haute couture, which has added new words to his fashion vocabulary. Lace, for instance, manifest here in a tablecloth skirt or a camisole attached as a boudoir-ish flourish to the front of a prim blue poplin blouse (I’d call that borderline perverse). And sequins, subtly lining those menswear-ish coats, so suggestive of a secret life.

The soundtrack was Julee Cruise’s “Falling,” soundtrack of that secret life. The set was a futuristic tunnel of light. Jones knows how to create a mood, an atmosphere of mystery almost. But it might be time for him to push the limits of the world he’s created at Fendi. I don’t imagine Silvia would complain.

Still, as Glenn Martens said yesterday, “Every smart creative director goes back to the founding values of the brand.” But he’s had a very different set of values to work with at Diesel. Company founder Renzo Rosso is “the Leonardo da Vinci of broken denim.” Or so he tells Martens every day (according to Martens). In the 1980s, Diesel industrialised distressed denim. In the two years he’s been in charge, Martens has changed the formula so aggressively — and been given the money to promote that change with big campaigns and shows — that there is a generation (let’s call it Z) who are discovering Diesel as SOMETHING NEW! just for them. An open-minded, free-spirited, sustainability-veering democracy of style. Which is why we walked into a massive exhibition space in Milan to be met by a mountain of Durex boxes, 200,000 in all, an appetiser for the 500,000 condoms Diesel will be distributing for free through their global network in April. “Successful Living” is the brand’s tag line. “And what’s more successful that being free with your body, your spirit and other people?” was the question Martens posed.

For the purposes of the show, “Successul Living” became “Sucsexful Living”.  On the soundtrack, Barbarella’s orgasmatron was cranked up to 11. Go ahead, have fun, respect each other, be safe. Hence the mountain of condoms. “The brand was initially a bit stressed,” Martens added, “but now they understand it’s not an egocentric point of view. The brand is talking to kids and you have to do this kind of thing to talk to a new generation.”

But his primary means of communication is obviously the collection. When Martens talked about it “lifting you up in a sensual, sexual way, not an intellectual way,” the proof was right before us, parading around Mt Condom. The Diesel ethos is biker denim distressed to the brink of dystopia, but Martens has found a way to infuse it with alien beauty, weaving denim with polyester organza in a devoré effect that he is trying to patent. Limbs and torsos glimpsed through sheer patches in jackets, jeans, skirts and evening sheathes generated a subtle erotic undertow. The implication of revelation was carried into double-layered jersey pieces (the top layer distressed to reveal the second skin colour beneath) or the way a single metallic D (for Diesel) choker held a black jersey gown in place at one model’s throat. Delicate traceries of draped chain performed a similar function for other equally dressy looks.

The suggestion of fragility in these outfits created a radical contrast with biker denims metallised and oxidised until they were practically armoured. It’s not a new technology, Martens explained, because it’s used in producing cars, but this was the first time it had been applied to clothes. And even that paled beside the collection’s artisanal grouping, all of it made from upcycled materials. Deadstock nylon was once coat linings, now it was covered with plastic and heated until it melted into a mess that made a new coat. Deadstock faux fur was painted, also covered with plastic and heated until it created a psychedelic effect Martens called “liquid fur.” And technical biker jackets were assaulted with a blowtorch until they crinkled and cracked into a hybrid new form. The intensity of the handwork involved in these pieces surely qualified them as a new kind of couture, grotesque but eerily gorgeous. Somewhere in the ether, Alexander McQueen was roaring his approval.

I wonder what Roberto Cavalli was roaring after Fausto Puglisi’s show on Wednesday night. Where Jones is respectful about his custodianship and Martens is anarchic, Puglisi simply channeled Cavalli so successfully that it was as though no time had passed since Roberto himself last scored a catwalk triumph, a good decade at least since he quipped, “Excess is my success.” Mariacarla Boscono walked in Cavalli’s 40th anniversary show 13 years ago. She closed Puglisi’s show on Wednesday. Now that’s continuity.

Puglisi’s been spending a lot of time in LA, where he does a lot of business. He felt that had helped tune him back into Cavalli’s past, not just his Hollywood fan club, but also his start in fashion, creating artisanal jeans for the proto-jet set in Ibiza in the 1960s. So Puglisi offered sinuous, sheer red carpet fantasias, alongside the rock-chickability of bedazzled denims. But he also claimed inspiration from a couple of icons of Americana: the legendary couture client Millicent Rogers (muse for Christian Dior and Gianni Versace) and the artist Georgia O’Keeffe, both of them residents of New Mexico, which encouraged a palette of sand and earth and desert sky, cowgirl leather patchworks and the occasional outcrop of turquoise.

It was truly excessive — the pelmet skirts, the bared midriffs, the thigh high slits, the micro this and maxi that — but excess was also its success, just as Cavalli predicted, as a fantastic blast from the past for anyone who ever relished (however guiltily) one of Roberto’s orgiastic presentations. And actress Bella Thorne, far too young to remember such prelapsarian moments, insisted it was just what her friends had been waiting for.

LONDON — “Dialing up on Britishness,” Burberry’s rallying cry as it attempts to carve itself a more resonant niche in the battle of the big-time brands, would appear to lend itself to the naturally abrasive instincts of its latest standard bearer. Daniel Lee turned Bottega Veneta around with a stark, confrontational aesthetic that lit a fire under the house. Burberry’s new CEO Jonathan Akeroyd is clearly hoping he’ll work the same dark magic here. And why not? What is “Britishness” now but a populist breaking down of decency and dignity and common sense, presided over by the decadence of a ruling party which gleefully plugs the Tory into “predatory?” Perfect fodder for a beady-eyed insurrectionist like Danny “The Red” Lee.

Well, that’s not what happened on Monday night. The show’s purpose-built venue was mere steps from the Oval, home of cricket, which centuries-old tradition dictates is the national sport. And the almost-cosy reassurance of tradition weighed heavy on Lee’s debut collection for Burberry. Post-show, he lavished praise on the brand’s archivist, who compiled for him references to fabrics and accessories from the past. Some of those fabrics from old English mills were a century old. Cut into a languid 1920′s-style tea-dress or a floating chiffon tent, they looked practically primed for a weekend party in a country house in a faraway time and place.

Lee celebrated Burberry’s foundational outdoors-iness in a decoy duck print, in the substantial wellies, in the dangling (faux) fox tails, in the fishing lures (they were actually fake feathers, i.e. fishing lures) that adorned a lustrous blue caftan. And hardy plaids and trench coats, of course. All of that “very British” in Lee’s eyes, because he saw the essence of the brand as “functionality.” One of Akeroyd’s major directives is to activate accessories. That’s Lee’s big challenge, because Burberry has never really had such a narrative. So he showed bags which, in their un-precious bulk, were designed, in his words, to be chucked on the floor. And that’s the kind of function that speaks to a world choking on frou-frou.

At the same time, Lee emphasised another kind of Britishness in the heraldic references: the Burberry knight galloping across an asymmetric T-shirt dress, the cluster of tassels on the shoulders of a sweater, the flurry of rooster feathers on a turtleneck and, most of all, the classic English Rose, the motif which he chose to dominate his debut. “A Rose Isn’t Always…Red” announced a T-shirt which sported said flower in the shade of blue which Lee has chosen to represent his Burberry, in the same way that his Bottega was illuminated by a vivid green. And all of this harked back to the “almost-cosy reassurance of tradition” I mentioned. I think Daniel Lee is a supreme ironist, an arch discombobulator, an expert at subverting the familiar. You could see it in the way he tipped Burberry’s signature plaid sideways. Or showed those roses in such peculiarly noir colours (I mean, brown is not my primary rose shade). One model, carrying a hot-water bottle and swathed in a velvet bathrobe rose-printed in dun shades of mustard and brown, could have stepped straight out of a British kitchen-sink drama of the 1950s, bar the luxurious flourish of leather-trimmed hems, and the eccentricity of the fur-trimmed mules.

My curiosity was equally sparked by the footwear. Clarks is a fine old English shoe brand, founded in 1825, three decades before Thomas Burberry launched his company. In 1967, Clarks launched a mutant moccasin called the Wallabee. It became the chosen footwear of numerous youth cults, and Patrick Cox’s mutation of the mutation went on to rule later youth cults as the Wannabe. In other words, a style which lends itself to re-interpretation. Lee showed his own huge-tongued, shearling-trimmed version. It all but screeched 2023 must-have. Which could mean mission accomplished for Lee’s paymasters.

So, back to “Britishness” in an era when “being British” engenders at best a sympathetic response from the rest of the world. Lee insisted that he wanted his Burberry to celebrate everything great about his Britain: its Westwood-ian creativity, its diversity. His T-shirts spoke of “Winds of Change.” Change for him, change for the brand. He thought it was a funny little touch (the song of that name by the stentorian Scorpions became the anthem of the Berlin Wall’s collapse). But Lee’s choice of William Bevan, the genius who records as Burial, for his soundtrack was closer to the bone. Just as the worn-out crackle of the sounds Burial makes is closer to the dystopian truth of “Britishness” today.

PARIS — My couture week started with a synchronicity, so it’s only fitting it should end with one. Even if the houses of Thierry Mugler and Azzedine Alaïa were not technically part of the couture schedule, their presentations were a slambang climax to the week. In life, Thierry, before he re-incarnated as Manfred, was so supportive of his friend Azzedine that he was acknowledged as an architect of his success. In death, their standard bearers are Casey Cadwallader at Mugler and Pieter Mulier at Alaïa. I have no idea if they’ve ever met, but this season showed that both designers are not only acutely sensitive to the legacies they’ve inherited but also more than up for the challenge of transmuting those legacies into something vibrant and relevant for an audience who are far away in time and place from the OGs.

Cadwallader is the fifth person to take on the Mugler brand. He only met Manfred a few times before he died a year ago, but they got on well enough that the formidable man mountain growled, “I think you might be the one, kid.” There was nothing about the show on Thursday night to suggest Manfred’s judgment was wrong. “We appreciate a lot of the same things,” said Cadwallader. “Movement, different expressions of gender, extreme transformations. Manfred took people and turned them into characters and my big difference is that I make them a supersonic version of themselves. What it means to be a powerful person is different now. People dress to make themselves feel hot rather than turn a man’s head. Bareness and showing curves is about self-pride.”

There was an orgy of both — bareness and curves, I mean — but Cadwallader talked about “rolling two dynamics into one” with this collection: hard edge on one hand, romance on the other. Biker leather, meet black lace. “I’ve always had an aversion to lace, but the thing you have an aversion to is the thing you need to try because maybe you’ll do it differently.” And he did. Lace became a defining element in his exploration of bareness and curves. More volume and draping too, dressier, but still sporty in the cut “because I want clothes to hug the body in a certain way, I want women with breasts and women with butts and women with hips to be able to wear the clothes and still have them be formfitting and move with them.”

Cadwallader broke the internet with his videos during lockdown. On Thursday night, he chose La Villette for his first physical show in three years. It’s a massive venue familiar to those who once trekked to the outskirts of Paris for Gaultier, Galliano and McQueen. He said he’d invited lots of kids from the city. “I want people to hoot and holler. No stone cold faces. I want a little drama.” And Cadwallader pulled off a remarkable feat: a proper, knock-down-drag-out spectacle in the grand Mugler tradition, but techno-updated for much darker times. Models stormed down one side of the arena, then rode a dolly back down the other, posing furiously while cameras tracked them from all angles (the “buttcam” being a vital part of the rig). A huge screen at the back of the arena relayed the results.

The audience became part of the performance, just the way Cadwallader had hoped. Real Housewife Lisa Rinna was in the front row. When late-night talkshow sensation-cum-Mugler model

iwe Fumudoh broke the fourth wall and came looking for her, it was the best moment of the past week. The sass, the savagery, the high pony whiplashing in mock fury. You crave that at the frontiers of pop culture. Or Pose’s Dominique Jackson as a blonde spider woman stalking past in lace body and black corset. Or Arca doing Arca, Omahyra doing Omahyra, before the slam dunk, Amber, Shalom and Eva Herzigova, Cadwallader acknowledging the power of legend, like Thierry bringing Jerry Hall or Julie Newmar or Tippi Hedren onto his stage. Yes, it was camp but that’s also the naked power of fashion to make memories and hold them forever, sacrosanct. A kind of profane church, in other words.

Mugler got the power. So did Az

edine Alaïa. His peerless exaltation of the female form induced ecstasy in his acolytes — and posed a serious challenge for anyone brave enough to step into his shoes. On Friday night, Pieter Mulier cracked it with a simple but bold solution. He showed the new collection in his own apartment on the 21st floor of Riverside Tower, a landmark piece of brutalist architecture in his hometown, Antwerp. Azzedine’s own at-home’s were legendary, from meals he’d cook for a chosen few to fully-fledged fashion presentations, a tradition Mulier continued. But he acknowledged that showing in his own home had opened up something for him. “It’s the most Alaïa I’ve gone and it was easier for me to do it because it was here. It was like I could do more Azzedine in my house than Azzedine in his house.”

It wasn’t so hard to analyse that seeming paradox. Mulier is a private person so sharing his new work at home with a small group of friends and industry professionals he felt comfortable with suited his personality. He also spoke about the general need for intimate connection, stilling the noise of this confusing moment in history. The invitation was a hand-written letter from him, personalised to each guest. The audience was seated on his furniture, some even perched on Mulier’s bed downstairs. And the soundtrack by his friends David and Stephen Dewaele, AKA 2ManyDJs, set the tone with Jeff Buckley’s sweet moan.

And all of that liberated Mulier to “do” Azzedine. The first looks — knitwear steamed into sensational shape, cut on the round, no seams front or back — channeled Alaïa’s curved tailoring from the 1980s. They were detailed with bugle beads, like pins, after a famous Jean-Baptiste Mondino image from the same period. A fluted skating skirt similarly echoed an Alaïa classic, as did bandage dresses in black leather and silvery lace. Mulier captured the master’s fetishistic undertow with leather harnesses, and a mac and pants cut from patent leather netting. And there was a shade of… I call it mushroom, Mulier prefers dark camel, or dirty green, that will forever be Azzedine to me.

The 21st floor of the Riverside Tower is moulded from suitably brutalist concrete, so two “concrete” dresses of stone-look jacquard felt like Mulier acknowledging his own home. And the finale of full taffeta skirts with turtlenecks whispered the modern evening looks he explored as right hand man to Raf Simons at Dior. In other words, as successful as his new collection was, Mulier promises to be much more than Alaïa’s medium. The aftershow dinner, in the Rubens Room of Antwerp’s Royal Museum of Fine Arts, finally casting off the shackles of an 11-year renovation subtly emphasized that promise. Walls hung not just with Old Master Peter Paul Rubens but also an idiosyncratic genius such as James Ensor are a reminder of the very particular cultural heritage in which Mulier is steeped. It already looks like it sits surprisingly well with Alaïa.

PARIS — Maria Grazia Chiuri’s celebrations of women for Christian Dior have most often been spun around the work of a female artist where the inspiration is necessarily more abstract, but the couture collection she showed on Monday was rooted in a real life, that of entertainer, activist and Black icon Josephine Baker and it was all the stronger for it. Chiuri’s starting point was a trove of old photos of Baker performing in New York in the 1950s, dressed in Dior, but the designer drew a narrative thread back to the 1920s, when Baker first arrived in Paris and created a sensation at the Revue Nègre and, later, the Folies Bergère. Sinuous metallic sheaths and flapper dresses fringed with crystal evoked the Jazz Age, undergarments wrapped in velvet robes suggested loungewear for backstage dressing rooms. A clutch of spectacularly simple columnar evening gowns in glistening satin and decadently toned crushed velvet — all of them crumpled, lived in — sang to the single spotlight of the cabaret star.

A good half of the collection was made up of daywear: tailored suits, coats, dresses, some in the men’s fabrics favoured by Monsieur Dior. Lengths were a sober mid-calf, which loaned a vintage flavour compounded by the hair, the makeup and the footwear (embroidered velvet shoes with a hunky mid-heel). But it was quite a pleasing effect. Chiuri said she was drawn to Baker because she understood the power of dress to confront racial stereotypes, and confound expectations of gender roles, like another famous Dior customer, Marlene Dietrich. Those women resonated with her, to the point where Chiuri picked the tuxedo coat as a personal favourite from her new collection. (Baker and Dietrich did almost as much for a man’s tuxedo as Fred Astaire and Cary Grant.) “That’s what I like for myself, really clean and timeless,” she added. And maybe it was that intimate personal resonance that gave this collection its subtle kick. It had soul.

Of course, it was also a Christian Dior show so it demanded some extravagant contextualising. American artist Mickalene Thomas created 13 photo-based collages in her signature style, celebrating Baker and a dozen other Black women who had blazed trails in their worlds, among them Dorothy Dandridge in movies, Nina Simone and Lena Horne in music, Donyale Luna in modelling. They were reproduced in giant embroidered wall-pieces executed by the Chanakya School of Craft in Mumbai. “Women — and great women artists — don’t celebrate themselves enough,” Chiuri said emphatically. “I’m obsessed with pushing women.” As usual, I was wondering where these remarkable pieces of contemporary art would end up when the music stops.

There was more contemporary art at the Chanel show on Tuesday morning in the sculptural animal forms created from cardboard, wood and paper by Xavier Veilhan to accompany a show designer Virginie Viard imagined as “a spontaneous village festivity.” Midsommar, or The Wicker Man, maybe? There was something of those cult classics in the giant abstracted creatures that were wheeled into an oddly shadowy show space. There were models concealed within, a hint of Spinal Tap perhaps, that was made more emphatic when a elephant trundled onstage at show’s end. From this giant structure, Anna Ewers emerged, a virgin bride in a veil embroidered with swallows.

It was klutzy and kultish, like a cross between a Trojan horse and a child’s horsey, and in an odd way, it was a perfect distillation of the collection itself. As much as it embodied haute couture in the extraordinary techniques that made the clothes, it also ensured that those clothes had a sparkly, frothy fairytale naivete that seemed bizarrely at odds with couture’s expression of a fundamentally adult sophistication. The same artistic sophistication, in fact, that shaped the original bestiary in Gabrielle Chanel’s apartment on Rue Cambon, the Coco ur-zone which Viard introduced Veilhan to at the beginning of their collaboration.

So back to the clothes. Viard liked the idea of majorettes, the kind that might lead a small-town parade of Americana in their flaring skirts or shorts, their laced booties, maybe even an abbreviated swing coat. There were top hats and bowties, as though the models were ringmasters in the circus of abstract animals that awkwardly filled the arena. When that hat and tie combo accompanied the transparent, tiered formality of the black grouping towards the end of the show, it took on a Girls-of-Guns n’ Roses edge. I’ve always maintained that Virginie Viard’s rock chick heart will ultimately define her tenure at Chanel. Here was a whisper of that future. Mind you, she covered her bases by embedding a Corgi picked out in pearls on classic Chanel tweed. Playing to the Palace, perhaps?

Ultimately, with houses the size of Dior and Chanel, the designers are bound by their ability to deliver the sales at street level. If they’re doing that, haute couture is allowed to become a thin-aired Everest of idiosyncrasy. The invitation for Giorgio Armani’s new Privé show featured a harlequin diamond pattern, which sparked simultaneous dread and curiosity. The dread was instantly consummated on entrance to the venue in the Garde Republicaine, where the French cavalry’s horses usually prance. A harlequin catwalk! So soon to be echoed in the diamond-patterned looks which took to that catwalk.

But then the dread was co-opted by the curiosity. Armani never takes on a theme by halves. If he’s in on harlequins, he’s all in on harlequins. So what did that mean? Harlequin’s home was in the grand Italian tradition of commedia del’arte with its origins in the carnival of Venice. Armani’s palette — aqueous blues and greens, shot through with a wintry sunrise pink — was the palette of Venice at a particular time of year. The sinuous flow of glittering floor-length sheaths duplicated the effect of light on water.

But there was also something fundamentally surreal about Armani’s presentation that made me think about what harlequins meant to Picasso and DeChirico and their peers: the romantic, the prankster. Giorgio clearly still has some tricks up his sleeve.

As forward-looking as fashion claims to be, it’s rarely thinking more than a season or two ahead. I’ve certainly never heard any designer talk about seven decades hence. But Chitose Abe isn’t any designer. Like her mentor Rei Kawakubo, Abe, the driving force behind the Japanese label Sacai, has created her own fashion vocabulary, hybridising fashion’s most familiar forms to create designs of a seductively skewed, sci-fi elegance. So it makes perfect sense to me that she can imagine them living on into a distant future, long after she herself has gone.

Remo Ruffini, who acquired Moncler in 2003, clearly felt the same way when he enlisted Abe to help him celebrate the brand’s 70th anniversary. They’d already worked together in 2010 on the Moncler X Sacai project when, as Ruffini sagely observes, “collaborations were not as popular as today, and sometimes they were viewed with a sort of scepticism for the fear of contaminating the ethos of the brand.” But Moncler X Sacai lingered with him as a particularly powerful moment in his company’s evolution, so there was an emotional resonance in bringing Abe back for Moncler’s 70th.

“Extraordinary Forever” was the celebration’s theme and that is, to be fair, why Abe was looking down the pipeline at another 70 years. Think of it as a metaphor for the future. It wasn’t like she jumped out of bed one morning with the 22nd century zapping her synapses. But Ruffini had faith that “forever” actually meant something to her. “Always looking ahead and designing for what is yet to come, Chitose and Sacai’s design mindset mirrors my own because in a way, we are never satisfied with the now and strive to offer something unexpected that will be a catalyst for future creativity.” In other words, what the next 70 years of Moncler might look like.

If that presents itself as a weighty challenge for a billion-dollar brand, the collaboration itself sounds appropriately intense. For starters, there are a mere four looks. In a spirited Google Meet with Abe, her right hand Daisuke Gemma and translator Kaori Funaki who were all in Tokyo, I tried to extract from the transcontinental ether what the essence of a four-look distillation of Sacai’s interpretation of Moncler’s future might be. Ruffini has made his fortune by morphing Moncler’s functional quilted down ski jackets into a broad-based luxury fashion statement. From mountain-top to Michelin restaurant without changing your jacket: that’s a potent transmogrification right there. Add to which the natural Sacai appetite for hybrids and you’ve clearly got a recipe for something. But what?

Gemma offered “transformation” as a clue. “The same garment, but a completely different feeling.” He added, “While we respect what Moncler has been doing, at the same time, what we can bring to the brand is a more creative way of dressing.” Take the normal human response to cold weather, which is layering. “Of course, you can just put everything on top of everything,” Gemma mused, “but we have a little bit more interesting idea of doing layers to create a new silhouette.” To me, a transformation is when a chrysalis becomes a butterfly. There is a notion of emerging. My past experience of Sacai suggests a similar process will be at work here, and the layering will probably be a trick of the eye. But how that will actually work in practical terms clearly needs to be experienced to be fully understood, which means we have to wait until January, when the four designs will debut at Sacai’s men’s show in Paris.

Unseen, they already embody the core of the Sacai philosophy. The Japanese concept of kachikan, the importance of a personal value system, has always been Abe’s motivation, much like her mentor Kawakubo. It has shaped Abe’s past collaborations, most recently with Jean Paul Gaultier and Cartier, even as those collabs also pragmatically represented something that Sacai normally couldn’t do (the fine jewellery aspect of Cartier, for example) or chose not to do. “We don’t make sneakers,” said Gemma. “We work with Nike to make sneakers.” That attitude was, in fact, the basis of Sacai’s original collaboration with Moncler in 2010. “When we first worked with Moncler, it was when we didn’t have a down jacket in the Sacai collection, so that was new for us,” said Abe. “Now, we have a down jacket, so we were thinking what would be new for us. And it was not about the creation, or the technical issues. It was more about being able to work with a powerful company like Moncler on a more focused intellectual project, very edited, very small, but being able to share this intellectual vision together. That was very much the difference from the first collaboration.” And also the point of departure from the other designers who worked on the “Extraordinary Forever” initiative.

Ruffini proposed they re-interpret Moncler’s brand icon, the Maya 70 jacket, for the anniversary. Rick Owens, Pierpaolo Piccioli, Giambattista Valli and Thom Browne were among those who took up his challenge. But Abe’s approach was unique. “The project this time was a heartfelt vision, more about how we express the kachikan than the business side,” she said. “Of course, it needs to be commercial when we are producing something, but this was more about how we respect our culture. More connected with our minds.” And for her, that had a lot to do with the idea of creating something that would endure beyond mere fashion cycles. “Something to be able to feel proud of the future, to be able to coexist in this precious world in a sustainable way.” This is Abe’s kachikan.

It’s coming up to Sacai’s 25th birthday. “We don’t really talk about it,” said Gemma. He claimed the future, not the past, is what absorbs Abe and him, though he had no idea what it might look like yet. Abe insisted they’re very positive. She is driven by a hunger for new perspectives. So far Sacai has a successful track record in satisfying that hunger. The brand’s foundational concept of hybrids, of merging and transformations, tracks fashion’s own evolving ideas about identity, gender, diversity. Did the duo think Sacai has been ahead of its time? “We believe in what we have been doing, we haven’t really changed so much,” said Gemma. “Luckily we had our own signature,” Abe agreed. “For us, being able to create something very unique hasn’t changed, but the society that accepts what we create has changed a lot. In the past it was more exclusive. Now it’s more inclusive.”

Of course, there have been other massive changes. A brand whose very raison d’être is all things snow-related must surely regard a world of rising temperatures with trepidation. It’s no surprise that Moncler’s own commitment to best environmental practice has won wide respect. It’s not something that Sacai, on the other hand, has really talked about. “It’s always a hidden message, you know?,” Gemma said, hesitantly. “All the people we work with, we borrow their voice basically. We don’t say it very loud ourselves but we borrow those people to express our attitude,” suggesting that working with a brand as huge as Moncler is one way for Sacai to acquire an activist voice of its own.

Sacai’s character lends itself to commitment. As curatorially inclined as Japanese fashion so often is, Sacai has taken the magpie impulse to extremes. A random grab-bag of past references includes the master of funk George Clinton, New York club Paradise Garage, cult movie The Big Lebowski… and Albert Einstein! For our interview, Gemma sported a sweatshirt from Sacai’s Tokyo pop-up celebrating new graphic designers and 90s house music. Abe was wearing a T-shirt featuring the singer Sade, guiding light for one of Sacai’s lockdown collections. It poured during that show. The raindrops sparkled like diamonds on the clothes. “Nature is more powerful than anything else,” Gemma murmured.

When I asked Remo Ruffini what his hope for Moncler’s future was, he said, “I wish to see a world where meaningful creativity and innovation remain as powerful as ever, and a place where relationships with communities and powerful experiences will be key to remaining a meaningful brand.” Rooted in these aims, Moncler’s Instagram-savvy Genius strategy, currently on pause, returns in 2023, this time with creatives from arenas beyond fashion offering their interpretations of the brand. But for now, the label has turned to Chitose Abe and Sacai, and the potent promise of four looks. In this case, less is more. Much more.

I’m not in the habit of writing love letters. My heart is already taken. But I feel it’s way past time to vent my decades-long passion for the photography of Steven Meisel. It’s been rekindled by an exhibition which opened this week in A Coruña, the Galician port where Inditex founder Amancio Ortega opened the first Zara store in 1975. That’s relevant because it’s his daughter Marta’s foundation which is staging the show in an exhibition space converted from warehouses on A Coruña’s waterfront.

The exhibition is remarkable for any number of reasons. Its full title “Steven Meisel 1993, A Year in Photographs” signposts its focus. According to Lina Bey, who has run his studio forever, Meisel photographed 124 magazine editorials, 28 Vogue covers and six advertising campaigns in that year alone. His prodigious output was matched by a creative spurt that resulted in a cluster of images that endure as modern fashion icons. And that was just one year of the many which define Meisel as the greatest fashion photographer de nos jours. I can’t help myself, I instantly jump to “Picasso 1932,” the breathtaking show staged at Tate Modern in 2018, which clubbed this viewer into submission with its reminder that Picasso’s greatest-ever status was founded on year after year after year of restless, questing genius, with 1932 singled out for its particular breadth and depth. Same with “Meisel93.”

But Picasso’s career has been endlessly celebrated, Meisel’s scarcely at all. There’s been barely any of the museum or gallery shows or editioned prints that have been afforded his peers, none of the weighty coffee table retrospectives and the most limited media access to the man himself — all by his choice, of course, which, given his body of work, seems willfully perverse. So it’s not simply the physical scale of the show, with over a hundred huge reproductions, that makes “Meisel93″ impressive. Its mere existence is remarkable.

Meisel has photographed a dozen campaigns for Zara. I take that to mean he has established a connection with Marta Ortega Peréz which helped her overcome his career-long reluctance to elevate himself. The focus on one year, 1993, was surely persuasive for him, but it also highlights the challenge for anyone who fancies anything as conventional as a retrospective for a photographer as multifaceted as Meisel. Where do you start?

In 2015, Meisel agreed to an exhibition-cum-auction of his work at Phillips. He chose 25 images from 1987 to 2011 under the title “Role Play.” And, wonder of wonders, he also agreed to talk on the phone. He said he’d never felt any need for celebration. “It was never a priority, just not so important to me, and then as the years kept going on, I thought, ‘Oh God, another year to try and edit.’ It’s become an absurd task, so maybe I can’t do it now because it’s overwhelming and I’ll go through contact sheets and in an hour I’ll be crying.”

“Emotionally, it’s very difficult for me to look at old work I’ve done,” Meisel admitted in that same conversation. “That’s why it was so hard to do the Phillips thing. It’s either because I look at what I could have done better, or I start crying over the people. I’m ridiculously sensitive, that’s just who I am, so it’s really tough for me to look at old pictures. I always get sad.” I asked him if that response was something as fundamental as melancholy at the transience of everything, including the beauty that is the currency of his work. “I’m not going to get into the whole meaning of life — of which there isn’t one anyway — but yes,” Meisel answered.

Seven years later, and there are times when the melancholy on the walls of “Meisel93″ is overwhelming. A longtime fascination with the Bright Young Things, the glittery party people who juiced up British high society in the 1920s, manifests itself in multiple images of stylish eccentrics like Hamish Bowles, Isabella Blow and Lucy Ferry.

In July ‘93, Blow chose a handful of young London beauties for Meisel to photograph for British Vogue. Among those subjects is Stella Tennant, gawky then, with a nose ring and a punk crop and no interest at all in the world of modelling. From that uncompromising entrée, she went on to become one of the great beauties of our time. And now she, and Izzy Blow and Lucy Ferry are gone, dead by their own hands. Time is the most brutal taskmaster of all.

But check the date that Meisel first photographed Stella in London. July 14. A week later, she’s in Paris, for a shoot with Linda Evangelista and Kristen McMenamy for Vogue Italia. The trajectory is not untypical for the young women with whom Meisel connected. At the dinner after the exhibition opening, I was seated next to Karen Elson. She told me her Meisel origin story: “I was 17, down to my last subway token which I was saving to get to the airport the next day, going back to Manchester with my tail between my legs. There was a snowstorm and I hid in Chelsea Piers all day but I was determined. I used my last quarter to call Brana [Wolf, Meisel’s stylist] from a payphone and she said, ‘Why don’t you come to the studio at 4 o’clock?’ And I did ten pages for Italian Vogue. My first shoot. It was Steven’s last before the Christmas holidays and he percolated over the break. ‘What can I do with her?’ When I came back, we shot my first cover, on my 18th birthday.” What Karen doesn’t mention is that that first cover, for Vogue Italia, involved a full makeover from hairdresser Ward and makeup artist Pat McGrath, which transformed Elson from a pretty brunette to the flame-haired oddity who proceeded to storm the citadels of high fashion.

That too is not untypical in the story of Steven Meisel. Elson is not alone when she says, “I’ve only really felt known and loved by Steven, like you have a secret and he has the psychic ability to draw that person out of you.” For a young model, it was often the professional opportunity of a lifetime. Christy Turlington said, “to have a campaign, a shoot, a first cover with Steven, that’s the moment when your career has the possibility of transforming into something much, much greater.”

Meisel was quite clear about his own thoughts on his Svengali-like sway when we talked in 2015. “I think I’m in every picture that I take, regardless of whether it’s a super-commercial something, it’s all me… I do do it all. I have many people to help me, but it is me.” That obviously begged the question about whether his work — the dowagers and the rock chicks, the screen queens and supermodels, the grunge kids and the perfect young Adonises — was all autobiographical. “Of course,” Meisel answered. “It’s me, it’s what I’m doing or experiencing. You’re in a different head all the time… I think, ‘Damn, I put my whole fucking life out there this week but people didn’t notice.’ I don’t ever regret it though.”

He himself had no idea what tied it all together. “I wish I knew.” I suggested something beautiful, but quite old-fashioned: loyalty. Over the years, Meisel has surrounded himself with a tribe of people — models, stylists, hair and makeup artists, set designers — who have become so acutely attuned to taking his direction that every photo shoot bears an auteur’s thumbprint. Like Hitchcock, or Fellini or Orson Welles. It infuses every image he creates, and makes it identifiable as his, regardless of how different it might be from the last Meisel picture you saw. You can always recognise the work of a master magician.

And there’s the answer to anyone who has ever wondered what the connective tissue is in the almost surreal variety of Meisel’s work. “If Avedon and Andy Warhol had a baby he would be Steven Meisel,” critic Michael Gross once observed. The polymorphous perversity of both those artists saturates his photographs. What distinguishes Meisel is his knowledge and love of fashion.

It was a childhood thing. Growing up in New York, he’d stake out model agencies and photograph the women coming and going with his Instamatic. He was also at the eye of a cultural hurricane in New York in the Sixties. His father worked in the music industry. Baby Steven saw the Supremes at the Copacabana, the Beatles at Shea Stadium. He was at Max’s Kansas City when he was 14 years old, the same time as he was attending the High School of Art and Design on East 57th Street. He worked his way up to the table at the back of the lunchroom where the cool kids sat. Among them was Pat Cleveland, who remembers a boy so beautiful he never had to be cool. Loulou de la Falaise and Marisa Berenson lived across the street. Meisel would snap them, too.

After high school, he studied fashion illustration at Parsons School of Design, made friends with Stephen Sprouse and Anna Sui, interned with Halston, worked as an illustrator for Women’s Wear Daily, moved into photography, took test shots for the Elite Agency, then Seventeen, W, Mademoiselle, Self… and finally Vogue. And all of that was the crucible which birthed stories that turned models into superstars, while completely recalibrating the concept of the fashion narrative. If there’s ever a Meisel biopic, it’ll be fashion heaven.

One of the more remarkable things to note about my trip to A Coruña was how many of the characters who populated the various chapters of the Steven Meisel story were present. Pat Cleveland, Marisa Berenson and Anna Sui were there. So were the hairdressers Garren, Thom Priano and Guido; the stylists Joe McKenna, Carlyne Cerf de Dudzeele and Karl Templer; the art director Fabien Baron (who shaped Madonna’s SEX book with Meisel and was responsible for the hyperchic merchandising that accompanies the exhibition). And there was a full contingent of Meisel’s stars: Christy Turlington, Amber Valletta, Naomi Campbell, Karen Elson, Edie Campbell, Coco Rocha, Karlie Kloss, Natalia Vodianova. Meisel himself, of course, was nowhere to be seen, which was scarcely a surprise. Rumour had it that he would visit the show in a few weeks, with Pat McGrath.

Linda Evangelista was missing, too. Theirs was one of the great fashion love stories from their very first Vogue shoot together. Meisel always placed great importance in collaboration. He loved models who could understand the narrative personae he gave them. Even better if they could enlarge them. You can see that in Evangelista’s contribution to the stories in “Meisel93.” Shoots separated in some cases by mere days reveal a range that qualifies her as quite possibly the best actress manqué who ever modelled. If it’s all, as Meisel once said, ultimately about himself, he couldn’t have wished for a better alter ego than Evangelista.

But I find something profoundly haunting about that idea. It tracks back to what Meisel said about melancholy. Back then, I asked him if the reason he got so emotional when he looked at old images was because he was finding his own truth in them. Makes sense. It’s his autobiography after all. Over the phone, I could hear him choking up.

Truth is beauty, beauty is truth — that is all you know on earth, and all you need to know. But it’s not an easy lesson.

Disclosure: Tim Blanks travelled to A Coruña as a guest of Marta Ortega Peréz.

MILAN — When he remodelled the garden of his home in Milan, Giorgio Armani added a pavilion, a wall of bamboo and an imposing pair of Japanese maples, transforming an awkwardly inclined courtyard into the kind of spare, contemplative space you might find at the heart of a ryokan in Kyoto. The ideal spot, in other words, for a fashion samurai, a lion in the winter of his years, to sit back and quietly reflect on his achievements.

But Giorgio Armani isn’t that person. “I need to forget that I’m 88, otherwise it’s over,” he declares. “I need to try as if I started today, and this is a problem because when I wake up in the morning, I’m 88, which is very hard.” Even after all this time, with the global empire, the billions, the awards, he exists in a state of perpetual dissatisfaction. “I’m not satisfied, because I want my current work to be appreciated, not to have an award for what I have done, not to have an attestation for something passed. That’s what wakes me up every morning. I still need to prove myself.” He tells me that he has never dreamed so much in his life, two or three dreams a night. “Sometimes I dream of doing a beautiful fashion show and when I wake up, I’m so angry because it was only a dream.” Even in sleep, he is pursued by dissatisfaction.

We are sitting in a room adjacent to the garden, with his assistant Paul and translator Anoushka. At one point, Armani says he likes my accent (“Australian-British” he calls it, only 1300 miles off). “It makes me really suffer that I can’t speak English. I would have loved to learn it.” But I’ve always been struck by how direct he is in interviews, and I assume that’s because he is able to express himself with complete clarity when he is speaking in his mother tongue. On the wall is a massive work by the Italian artist Silvio Pasotti. It’s a surrealistic melange of fashion history, designers, models, magazine covers collaged with iconic images like the Helmut Newton photograph of Karl Lagerfeld in a black bathing suit. He sprawls insouciantly across the bottom of the painting. That’s not the only time he’ll appear in this story. Next to him, in the left-hand corner, Armani sits looking back over his shoulder at the artist. He’s shirtless, sexy in denim shorts and Pasotti has tattoo-ed a Lacoste crocodile on his shoulder. “Because that was the time of Lacoste,” the designer laughs.

We happen to be talking a week before Armani shows his Spring/Summer 2023 collections for Emporio and his own line. His workload remains unchanged. I ask him how each season starts for him. “With a blank piece of paper, and my hands in my hair,” he says ruefully. “Then I take away what wasn’t good in the past. And I look at what’s happening at the moment. I look at my colleagues’ work. Sometimes I’m positively surprised, many times negatively.” Armani is notoriously judgemental. At the moment, he’s not positively surprised. What does he look for? “Where the novelty is, what exists of the fashion of the time that still can be right for today.”

But when “today” is defined by a war, a pandemic, rampant political and financial instability and, overriding everything else, environmental catastrophe, what exactly is “right”? The war in Ukraine has hit Armani hard. He has his own childhood experience of WWII as a reference. He grew up in Piacenza, a small city to the south-east of Milan, and he has vivid memories of taking refuge in the local movie theatre during Allied bombing raids. When he was nine, he and his friends found a bag of gunpowder. While they were playing with it, it exploded. He spent six weeks in hospital on the brink of death. Legend has it that the skin on one foot still bears the imprint of his shoe buckle.

“When I look at the news and I see the images of suffering, it feels like what I’m doing doesn’t make sense nowadays,” Armani says. “This is where it’s difficult for my job, but I need to beat this feeling, this sort of brake that I have that doesn’t enable me to create. I have an example, the recent women’s show, the one I decided to show without music. It was just a few days after the war had started, I did a press conference in this room. I was asked about fashion and in that moment, I just couldn’t speak about it.” Anoushka interjects, “I was there so I can honestly say, Mr. Armani started crying.”

I doubt Giorgio Armani sheds tears very often. For nearly 50 years, his major motivation has been this: “It’s important to not live off nostalgia, to not be doing anything gratuitous, and, most importantly, to innovate, but always keeping in mind that you need to try and make men and women comfortable, feel good in the clothes. Never forget that’s the prime purpose. I can help better my customers’ lives in this way.” That’s also been his consolation through the most difficult periods of his life.

It is a challenge to appreciate how a proposal which sounds so benign now was so radical at the beginning, Armani recalls, “that not everybody understood, because even then, fashion was trying to do something explosive, not necessarily to be comfortable. But then slowly, people understood that my proposal to make fashion more acceptable was the right thing to do.” It’s almost as if he was more reactionary than revolutionary, taking a stand against the extreme proportions, the extreme hairstyles, the extreme everything of the late 60s and early 70s. And then, ironically, reaction bred revolution.

The Pasotti painting on the wall behind us dates from 1978. Armani’s business was barely three years old at that point, but the artist already saw fit to include him in the fashion pantheon alongside Chanel, Dior, Balenciaga, Saint Laurent and the other immortals. He instantly became part of history when he de-stuffed fashion as radically as his idol Coco Chanel had done half a century earlier. But that same history has a tendency to rub the edges off a revolutionary and seal him in the aspic of his past achievements. Armani says he’s happy I think of him as a radical, even happier that I don’t call him nostalgic. “My big fight is with time,” he says, and when time is the enemy, you don’t want to indulge it.

And yet, he can make it sound like there is something vaguely liberating about time passing. He talks about feeling more detached with age, less anguished, maybe more cynical. “I find certain things absurd. Sometimes I think the designer is just too much in his own world of trying to propose something which has to be on covers or that needs to shock, rather than really thinking of the purpose of his job. When I see fashion trying to be in the news just for novelty, I find myself quite shocked, so I become even more cynical. I don’t believe in it. Even when they talk about my things, when I make something a bit outrageous and they say they sold it, I don’t believe them. You know, there may be one hundred people around the world that like something extravagant, but in normal life, I don’t believe in it.”

What about Armani’s use of the word “novelty.” Does he believe it’s possible for anything to be really new in fashion? “No, but maybe you can find a new way to adapt something that has already existed to today’s context, so you find a new way to propose something.” What he really hates is the determining force of “fashionability.” Again, I wonder if such a thing still exists. “Si, certo,” he says instantly. “You just have to look around you and see how some people dress, and they are all following a certain thing that’s of the moment. They all look the same.”

Armani describes himself as isolated, not social, a slave to his job. “But it’s different to before. Now there’s a real empire behind me that I need to preserve for later when I won’t be here anymore.” This is, of course, the succession plan that drives the fashion industry crazy with speculation, because it is so shrouded in mystery. Not to mention that Armani-branded products generated €4 billion in 2021. Rumoured overtures from Bernard Arnault’s LVMH, the Agnelli family’s Exor and Mayhoola, the Qatari investment fund that owns Valentino, are maybe just that. Rumours. “Forgetting what’s happening in the rest of the world, that’s how I plan,” Armani says cryptically. “That’s why I’ve isolated myself. To know what’s the right thing, not following the road that I don’t like. You know, it is very simple. Say no.” One thing that is telling is how much Armani values his independence. And that’s something he would really like to guarantee.

The Bloomberg Billionaires Index estimates his personal net worth at $9.5 billion, making him the richest fashion designer in the world, and he has clearly sacrificed for that success. Armani often maintained that if he could live his life over, he would do things differently. “Yes, I would still change certain things,” he says today. “I realised I don’t really have friends, aside from my close family and people in the company. With friends, you need to cultivate them, you need to provoke them.” In other words, he has done neither. Years ago, Armani told me he never wanted kids because he thought he would be “an envious father.” I assumed he meant he’d be over-protective. But I’m wondering if he feels like he missed out. I’m telling him something Karl Lagerfeld said towards the end of his life — how he’d found he could feel real love, for his cat Choupette, for Hudson, the young son of model Brad Kroenig — and Armani suddenly sparks up. “Yes, incredibly for me too. It’s different now, you’re absolutely right. For two years, there’s been a little child running around these offices, the daughter of one of my close collaborators. She has become love, and for the first time I have found a vulnerability. I’ve never had this sort of love. It has made me different. I’ve found my tender side.” In a coincidental twist, Armani is also very attached to his cat.

Giorgio Armani, happy at last. But he learned a long time ago not to trust that feeling. When he started his company, there were two: Armani and his partner Sergio Galeotti. They met at the beach in 1966, when Armani was designing menswear for Nino Cerruti. Galeotti, 11 years younger, had the innate sense of superiority all Tuscans possess (according to other Italians) and it was his drive that pushed his older lover to go solo. He made him sell his Volkswagen for money to seed the fledgling business. Armani remembers those early days, creating something with someone he loved, as “indescribable joy. There was a thrill and an enthusiasm. Sergio was explosive, he was much more courageous than me.” He laughs as he looks back. “Sometimes he forgot his conscience, sometimes he was a little bit too much.” He considered Galeotti his alter ego. That’s how people remember him, ferocious, sardonic, very driven, but also very entertaining. “It was a nice balance between me being more held back and Sergio being more brave. And maybe it happened because we weren’t even really aware of what we were building together.”

In 1984, Galeotti was diagnosed with AIDS. He moved to Paris, to be near the Pasteur Institute, where Luc Montagnier was making early breakthroughs in the understanding of HIV. For 12 months, until Galeotti’s death in August 1985, Armani shuttled between Milan, Paris, New York, and everywhere else their rapidly growing business needed him. “I had to go on with the job, I had to design, but I had to be close to Sergio. It was the worst year, though actually, at the time, it was step by step. I didn’t really think what was going to happen. I definitely didn’t think I could make it by myself.”

And neither did anyone else. It was widely assumed within the industry that Armani would simply retire. But he is a Cancer and “a crab gathers everything to itself,” he says. He found a new self-determination after Galeotti’s death, absorbing his alter ego, moving forward with sole control of the business. When I suggest that the whole Armani edifice is a monument to Galeotti, he agrees. “In a certain sense, yes, because he gave me the strength. Everything really started with Sergio, and if I didn’t have the strength to react as I did, this company wouldn’t exist. So, yes, it’s due to him.” Does he ever wonder how it would have looked if Galeotti hadn’t died? “I think Sergio would maybe have made Armani a little bit more revolutionary, a little more explosive,” he muses. “I’m very practical, he was a dreamer.”

But then, Armani interrupts his chain of thought. He wants to acknowledge another individual, Leo Dell’Orco, who has worked for the company since 1977, and is currently head of the Men’s Style Office. (Armani’s niece Silvana is his counterpart in the Women’s Office.) “After Sergio’s death, he has been the closest person to me,” Armani says. “He gave me an incredible psychological support, practical as well as workwise. Primo Sergio, poi Leo.” Successionists might want to file that name away for future reference.

But his acknowledgment of Dell’Orco also validates that vulnerability Armani was talking about. He seems more open. He looks more relaxed in photos. Remember all those moody monochrome press shots from earlier decades, with Armani idealised as if by George Hurrell in Hollywood’s Golden Age. They actually made sense, because one of his original ambitions was acting. Paul Newman was an inspiration. It’s an irresistible notion that he’s been playing a role all these years: Giorgio Armani, superstar designer. “Yes, a little dose of acting is part of my job as well, isn’t it?,” he agrees. “It’s not that I’m not natural, I stay true to myself. But I have to be a bit more. The people around me expect me to be a certain way, so I do have to act a little.”

Elements of the act have attained a certain notoriety over the years: Armani, the hard taskmaster, so demanding that former employees still wake up years later in a cold sweat thinking they haven’t finished something they were supposed to do. Is it an act or an extension of his own conflicted dissatisfaction? Armani himself insists that he tries not to let himself be seen as “a usurper, someone who takes advantage of people”. He hopes that his reputation is as “a kind man.” But he also once told me that his reputation was like handcuffs. And, professionally at least, his opinion hasn’t changed. “People think of me in a certain way and doing a certain type of fashion.”

Which rather begs the question of how Armani would like to be remembered. He takes a long pause before he answers, “…as a sincere man. I say what I mean.” That seems like a humble response from a man who rules a huge fashion empire. “Unfortunately,” he says with another easy laugh. “I am an emperor who doesn’t feel like one.” It must mean something that the part of his empire that Armani still finds most engaging is his fashion shows. “When what I decided in my head comes out on a model, and it corresponds to what my idea was, it’s very gratifying. No one else exists in that moment. It’s very intimate. It’s not a contract, it’s not signing something.” A few days later, I’m backstage at Emporio, and I witness the astonishing sight of Armani working his way down a lineup of models, minutes before they go onstage, hands on to the very last second as he adjusts the eye makeup on every single young woman to create a scintilla of light.

For years, Armani’s clothes were so identifiable by their neutral tones he became known as the King of Greige. The sobriquet riled him. Then his collections became as distinctive for their evocative shades of blue: sea and sky. More recently, light is the key ingredient. Armani called his last haute couture collection Petillant, “sparkling.” The weightless fabrics of his ready-to-wear collection for Spring/Summer 2023 shimmer with gold and silver, counterpointed by luminous evening shades of blue and purple. It may well be more a reflection of my own needs at the moment, but I’m detecting a spiritual thread in this glimmer of the great beyond. Armani gives this some thought. “With age comes a certain detachment from the materiality of things, but also from the hustle and the bustle of work. I care less about other people’s opinions, and never cared about trends. I keep doing what I do, and I keep purifying the output. Would I call that spiritual? Probably not. Spirituality is something very private, while clothes are objects. But for sure, everything I do now is pure and it has more light. It reflects my condition of existential lightness, which of course hides a certain gravitas.”

That very much sounds to me like the musings of a lion in winter, in light of which my last question is obvious. Does Armani ever think about what happens next, not for the business but for himself? I don’t actually expect him to answer, but he does. “For the time being, I keep thinking about work and life, not fantasising too much about the afterlife. That is something that I keep for the deepest recesses of my thoughts. I am sure that, when it will happen, it will be a surprise.”

Decades ago, Armani bought a house in his hometown Piacenza. It was near a park filled with beautiful trees, and he once told me that he wanted to give a name to every single tree in that park. “And when a tree dies, something in me dies too.” Now that was a surprise. His connection with nature felt so poignant to me that I have to bring it up again, while we’re sitting looking at his beautiful Japanese maples. “No, I don’t remember that,” Armani says. “It’s nice. It could have happened.” I guess anything can happen. And it will always be a surprise when it does.

Giorgio Armani has been a member of the BoF 500 since 2013. Explore the BoF 500 community here.

Paris — Balenciaga’s show took place on the rim of a giant mud installation by artist Santiago Sierra, who has always courted controversy with his close-to-the-bone scenarios. The air in the venue was redolent of the smell of freshly turned earth. Maybe this was the site of a missile strike, maybe a recently exhumed mass grave. Events in Ukraine weigh heavy on designer Demna, given the trauma of his youth in nearby Georgia. When his models arrived, tramping through the mud in hoodies and shorts, they were battered and bruised, like kids dragged off the street to fight Putin’s senseless war. Their desperation was palpable. BFRND’s soundtrack was a relentless rat-a-tat-tat sonic assault.

But Demna’s casting was a democracy of the displaced. It wasn’t only scruffy kids in tatty sportwear, and Kanye West dressed as a security guard. It was women in evening gowns, trailing through the mud, it was tech workers, gym bunnies, tycoons, club kids. War had arrived on their doorstep. They had to leave now so they were taking a dirt track to the border, because the roads were closed. That was when the missile struck. You read it in the paper yesterday.

That’s one way of interpreting the extraordinary scenario Demna offered us on Sunday. Another was the one he gave us post-show. You’re so tired of being put in a box, especially by social media, but the more you try to be yourself, the more you get punched in the face. So you just have to get back on your feet and fight through the bullshit. And you have to dig for the truth, create one huge sucking pit of honesty at all costs.

Balenciaga is a luxury label, and Demna sees luxury being put in a box too. Why should it just be a cashmere sweater, he wondered backstage. Why couldn’t it be a distressed, graffiti-ed track suit that it had taken a dog’s age to besmirch? Balenciaga now has a whole Department of Ageing Things and Making Them Dirty. “It’s much harder to make things dirty,” he insisted.

Some of the models had papooses with (not real but scarily lifelike) babies in them. Demna loved the idea that a dad could be someone with piercings, who wore ballerinas and crazy clothes. He’s now 41. Maybe he’s feeling broody, which would be an investment in optimism. Yes, he’s an optimist, he claimed, but he’s not seeing much to be optimistic about. Even though he skated around the issue of how close the mise-en-scene of his new show was to current events, Demna continued to claim the show was like a personal therapeutic exercise for him. He liked the idea of not knowing where the dirt track led.

He also said that it was the outlet he had with haute couture that allowed him the freedom to create such dystopian fantasias. One was about brand heritage, the other was about himself, (im)pure and unadulterated. But he created such irresistibly current images that you could only think he was being a bit disingenuous. Like the last catwalk pairing: Julia Nobis in a glamorous column of black sequins, trailed by a hunched crone in a dress cobbled together from old leather tote bags. She looked like she wanted to Eat the Rich. And that’s a message which is truly torn from today’s headlines.

In one of those funny synchronicities that fashion excels at, Pierpaolo Piccioli was also thinking about boxes. His theme at Valentino was Unboxing, as in opening Pandora’s box and unleashing a whole platform of possibilities. The show invitation was actually a black plastic box. It was quite hard to dispose of in a hotel room, meaning at least one possibility — the one that involved recycling — became a bit of a chore.

The show manifesto declared “Multitude becomes one.” There was certainly enough of last season’s pink in the audience to induce a headache of homogeneity. On the catwalk, the manifesto translated into another fiesta of head-to-toe monochrome, though this time it was scrupulously matched to the skin tone of the model wearing the look. Ideally, this would pull focus to the face, the individuality of the wearer, but there were unfortunate distractions, not least of which was the problem a number of the models had with their footwear. And — cruel irony — the catwalk was an unusually lengthy and arduous trek, up and down, backwards and forwards, which added to the unendurable length of the show itself. Another own goal was the way some models had their faces stencilled to match the Valentino logo on their outfits to create a completely character-denying effect.

Piccioli has been swirling his couture and ready-to-wear together for a while. Anyone looking for a pair of dungarees in duchesse satin knows where to come next Spring. He’s also expressed a fluid attitude towards gender. Whether it’s marabou, sequins or chiffon, his girls and boys were once again drinking from the same well. But what these swirls and twirls have done is make it difficult to see who Valentino is actually for anymore. Under Mr Valentino himself, there was never a scintilla of doubt, but after a run of seasons where he was fashion’s cock of the walk, it felt here like Piccioli got lost in a grandiose and ultimately confusing statement about…um…unboxing? Maybe it’s best to try that in comfortable shoes.

PARIS – Saturday was Japan Day in Paris: Junya Watanabe first thing, Noir Kei Ninomiya at midday, and Comme des Garçons, the mothership, in late afternoon. Enough breathing space between the three shows to absorb their challenging and uniquely different propositions, but also to reflect on the connective threads of Japanese fashion. The influence of Western dress during the Meiji period in the late 19th and early 20th centuries left a legacy of tailored Victorian and Edwardian formality. The Allied occupation post-WWII injected a whole other style vocabulary — jazz, jeans, leather jackets, youth cults — then came the wave of designers who osmosed all that Western jive with traditional Japanese ideas, like wabi-sabi, the embrace of the imperfect and incomplete. The result has been an enduring avant-garde which, fifty years after Issey Miyake first showed in Paris, continues to deliver intelligent, provocative and often beautiful ripostes to fashion orthodoxy.

Junya Watanabe’s mutations of Western pop culture have been responsible for some of my favourite shows over the years, especially the “Travis Bickle” men’s collection from Winter 2006. For Spring 2023, he imagined London’s New Romantics teleported to now. But if that promised an updated version of Steve Strange’s redictable detour. Eugene Souleiman’s hair for the first look was the clue: a huge, teased, florid red coxcomb that instantly summoned to mind the strange living creature named Martin Degville. Pop completists will recognise him as the creative engine behind Sigue Sigue Sputnik. But it was Junya’s genius that transposed the Flash Gordon camp of Sigue with the similarly exaggerated self-absorption of Goth: two narcissistic youth cults for the price of one.

The message of the collection was felt-tipped into a pair of heavily worked Levi’s:  You  can be whatever you want, particularly if that was Siouxsie Sioux on the cover of The Face in February 1982 or the kids lining up six months later to get into the Batcave, birthplace of Goth.  In fact, Junya made his own club atmosphere, with the same purple strip lighting some of us remember from misspent youths.  At the end of the show, the music was turned off abruptly and the lights went out, telling you it was closing time.  Just like those old clubs.  Funny ha-ha.

Michel Gaubert’s soundtrack whipped up an enthusiastic aural froth of Duran Duran and Japan the band, but Junya’s clothes went darker than that.   Shoulders were sci-fi,  proportions exploded into swirling capes and elongated drapes over leggings, latex, sequined or shredded, like Dracula’s brides gone clubbing. The iconoclasm innate to Japan’s contemporary fashion lexicon owes a profound debt to Vivienne Westwood. (In fact, wherever it exists in the world, fashion iconoclasm usually owes her a royalty). It’s hard to see the plaids, the chains, the rips and zips, even the strings of pearls (Viv loved the Queen) without thinking of her transmutations of British tradition. And so it was here. Junya didn’t miss a trick. Punks, Goths and New Romantics all appreciated speed as a cheap and efficient high. Listed collaborators for this collection included the likes of McLaren, Honda and Komine, a Japanese company which makes gear for motorbike racers. Maybe not exactly what the club kids had in mind, but go-fast just the same.

Noir’s Kai Ninomiya, a former patternmaker at Comme des Garçons, comes from – or rather, goes to – another place. He described his new collection as “a mystical journey through the depth of the noir universe.” If you could imagine a designer researching their latest looks through the lens of the James Webb space telescope, that designer might be Ninomiya. Coils of dark matter sparkled, quarks and fractals glittered, the trajectories of constellations were mapped in a cloud of shivering silver wires. The last look was an astral fairy cloaked in a cascade of evanescent star trails.

But the Noir universe was also grounded in more terrestrial terrain, courtesy of a collaboration with Hunter boots, and ceramic headpieces by the artist Takuro Kuwata. Wabi-sabi is a cornerstone of his work. Here, he contributed objects that were a cross between crude crowns and collapsing cakes. But they imbued Ninoyima’s models with a surreally aristocratic quality, especially when matched with mad-hatter hairstyles that looked like Marie Antoinette dragged backwards through a hedge.

There were elements of that tailored Edwardian formality I mentioned: jackets in houndstooth, britches in Prince of Wales check, high-necked blouses, long skirts. But they were twisted, caged, corseted. At its vexing best, Japanese fashion has an inscrutable alienness, and Ninoyima is an excellent ambassador for the alien.

Though he has nothing on his mentor Rei Kawakubo. The Mistress of the Cryptic has lately taken to elaborating ever so slightly on the clothes she presents and, to a reassuring degree, her proclamations dovetail with her designs. “A lamentation for the sorrow in the world today,” were the words that arrived with her new collection. Followed by “a feeling of wanting to stand together.”

The twin poles of despair and hope were so hopelessly entangled in the actual clothing that it was hard to extract one from the other. Kawakubo has tended to steer clear of the polemic in her designs, allowing them to exist outside social or political comment, but it has been kind of wonderful to see her engage more with the world. A few things instantly stood out in this show. One was that the models wore helmet or crown-like headgear, and it was my extremely erudite colleague Luke Leitch who identified them as virgin’s crowns, or crants, in which maidens were once buried. (Hamlet’s Ophelia was interred in a crant, said Shakespeare.) The other was that the stately soundtrack was by Greek composer Eleni Karaindrou, who scored “Mad Max:Fury Road.” I sat through the show looking at the pretty young models with their streaming white tresses and their outfits composed of lace glossed with black oil slicks and defensive carapaces of fabric and brocade bedspreads folded into skirts and shirts turned upside down so that collars were hems, and I thought that these were women at the end of the world, making the very best of what they had and learning to triumph in the face of hellish adversity. And they would triumph.

So that is what the very best of Japanese design can leave you thinking at the end of what is ultimately just a parade of new clothes to fill the new season’s demands. And nobody does it better.

MILAN—It’s human nature to try and extract themes from something as multiversal as fashion. After all, the species generally favours order over chaos.

So, after a day of wild variety on the catwalks of Milan, I’m throwing my hat in the ring for democracy as Wednesday’s subtext. It was at least a topic of conversation while, in the wider world, Joe Biden made a stand for democracy at the United Nations in the face of Vladimir Putin’s nuclear nihilism, and New York Attorney General Letitia James announced a civil lawsuit against the Trump family, who are accused of defrauding the state of at least $250 million. That surely is the will of the people at work.

Meanwhile, in Milan, Glenn Martens staged his latest show for Diesel in front of 5000 people tiered all the way to the ceiling of the huge Allianz Cloud arena.

“Everyone can be part of Diesel,” he declared, in a democratic riposte to the notion that fashion is where elitism comes home to roost. It helps, of course, that Martens’ medium at Diesel is denim, the people’s fabric. But what he does with it — and to it — is anything but basic.

Denim was woven onto a transparent base to create a devoré effect for the corset attached to low-slung jeans. It was “part-solarised” (translation — sun-bleached) to create an ombré effect on a floor-sweeping coat. And the distressed effect that was probably Renzo Russo’s unique selling proposition when he launched Diesel four decades ago was carried to a logical extreme in looks held together by their lining. Denim was plasticised, corroded and shredded into pink feathery tufts, generally abused every which way in the name of an incredible degree of almost couture-level artisanship, though Martens was quick to emphasise that the effects were achieved industrially.

Filling the centre of the arena was a huge inflatable sculpture of four figures entwined, recognised by Guinness as the biggest such thing in the world. It was a bit Rorschachian in that everyone seemed to see something different. My neighbour thought it was a woman giving birth, I saw a ménage à trois (well, the invitation did come with a glass butt plug — and please tell me that wasn’t just my active imagination). In actuality, it was four figures arranged in a physically impossible combination.

But when the models moved through the sculpture, each of them the size of one figure’s ear, it took on a fairy tale element. And there is something of a fairy tale in Martens’ take on Diesel. He described his post-apocalyptic tribe of sand-blasted kids — some of them green or purple-skinned — as “ready to nail life, ready to fuck you over and have fun.” Lost boys and girls raving to the end of the world, with a newly-blonded Martens as their feral shaman.

Rave was always its own kind of subversive democracy, which means the last place you’d expect to find it would be in the ateliers of Fendi. Unless you were bearing in mind that there has always been an imp of the perverse hiding inside Silvia Venturini Fendi. As she herself says, Fendi’s double F is logo-fied duality, and under Karl Lagerfeld, the brand seesawed quite happily between past and future, Classical Rome, fin-de-siecle MittelEuropa and outer space.

His successor Kim Jones is developing a much less schizy signature. True, the draped, elongated lines occasionally have the implacability of classical statuary, which also loans itself to a sci-fi elegance, but Jones’s frame of reference is a lot more immediate. Namely, the Fendi women and how they dress, especially how Delfina resuscitates clothes from her mother Silvia’s closet. There is past and future, but it’s the progression between generations rather than centuries.

Jones insisted that the silhouettes in his latest collection were purest Delfina: the long dresses, the baggy trousers, the skirts worn over trousers. There was utility in the straps that harnessed those trousers (now that might be a theme for Spring), there was a sportiness in the racer-backed dresses. The trompe l’oeil of a twinset with sleeve thrown over one shoulder mirrored the casual way Delfina wore her sweaters. There were quotes from Karl, because Jones is a past master at cleaving close to the ethos of whichever brand he’s designing for, in the same way that his celebration of the Baguette in New York last week was very specifically about the maximalism of Fendi circa 1997, the year the bag was released. Here, the rose print that sparked sheer tank dresses in technical organza came from a 1996 collection. Their athletic underpinnings had sports logos from 2000.

“We always bring a bit of history into it,” said Jones, but his work often gets really interesting when it’s his own history he’s bringing into play.

The collection borrowed an earthy palette from the last couture show, but it was interrupted by pink, blue and a vividly synthetic green which arrived on the catwalk as a pair of rubber platform boots, shortly followed by a green jean jacket in what looked like terrycloth (actually, shearling made to look so by the master craftspeople in the Fendi atelier) and some green thick-soled sneakers. Jones namechecked Daniel Poole, the original streetwear brand whose DP logo was all over raves in the early 90s. On the soundtrack, Gat Décor’s classic club track “Passion” underscored the reference. Jones himself enthusiastically lived this moment in British club culture, and bolting it on to Fendi’s satiny luxe felt like his own quirky addition to the lexicon of oddities that Lagerfeld compiled for the brand.

Schizy? Jones scoffed at the notion. “It’s just simple answers,” he said. It was left to Silvia to remind us of the dual essence of the double FF. “Simplicity and complexity,” she added.

The democracy that was on Fausto Puglisi’s mind after his show for Roberto Cavalli was much less abstract. Italy’s general election on Sunday threatens to install Giorgia Meloni as prime minister, who would be Italy’s first far-right leader since Mussolini. Puglisi sees Meloni’s vehemently stated positions – anti-EU, anti-immigration, anti-LGBTQ rights – as a threat to Italian democracy. Those concerns, however, had no influence on the collection he showed (I concede that, at this stage in the story, my theme is a trifle stretched) unless his celebration of Hollywood at its most decorative could be construed as an escape from harsh political realities.

Backstage, Puglisi rhapsodised about the costume designs of Adrian, the jewellery of Tony Duquette, and the films of Hitchcock, especially “Marnie.” He opened the show with a white silk faille dress which Tippi Hedren would have done full justice to. “I wanted that naïve freshness,” said Puglisi (though I remember Marnie as being a rather dark, troubled character).

He claimed he wanted “to go classic, my way.” What that meant was an exuberant, campy collection that had glimmers of vintage Cavalli in the use of leopard and python prints — in the same outfit, even — but mostly expressed Puglisi’s own winning enthusiasms. The leitmotif was a pineapple straight out of the Duquette playbook (he was apparently Fausto’s first obsession). It was delivered as a sweet retro print on a 50s circle skirt, or a glittery cocktail carapace. Puglisi has mastered the flou of classic Cavalli — those long, sinuous gowns — but he emphasised his own precision with pleated tops and skirts that struck a Capucci chord.

“An Italian way to relate to the United States,” he explained. More knowingly Hollywood was the long pleated skirt over matching shorts with a bandeau top. Poolside, Beverly Hills, Slim Aarons ready.

LONDON — Simone Rocha’s first collection for men floats in on a raft of words from her: a reaction to distress, a contrast of fragility and remorse, anger and nature… urgency. It’s the same kind of vocabulary she’s been using since she began showing at London Fashion Week in 2010. The designer has never been afraid of emotional extremes or dark thoughts. In fact, she’s thrived on them, pouring her interior world into a brand that is expected to generate $17 million in 2022, more than 30 percent up on last year.

Acknowledging “a slight morbid feeling” in her latest designs, Rocha says, “I know it happens naturally in the work.” There is something faerie-fey about her designs, an Alice-not-quite-in-Wonderland quality that she herself embodies with her Celtic lilt and her pale skin offset by a long tangle of jetblack hair barely restrained by a ribbon. And now she’s bringing a man into that world.

She would insist he’s always been there. “I do feel that, with all the stories I’ve told over the last decade, there have been men in different guises.” Last season, for instance, was inspired by the “Children of Lir,” an Irish legend in which the sons and daughters of a King are turned into swans by their evil stepmother. Two years ago, it was J.M. Synge’s play “Riders of the Sea” which provided the backstory of a woman in the Aran Islands whose husband and sons drown in an Atlantic storm. “Sometimes, the men are pillars of strength,” Rocha muses. “Sometimes, they’re something to push against.”

One thing they’ve never been, however, is the main attraction. That could change on Sunday, when Rocha, who is pressing ahead with her London Fashion Week show, presents 17 men’s looks alongside her Spring/Summer 2023 women’s collection.

It’s a provoking prospect. Rocha’s shows have always been intense affairs, not just for the way they’ve drawn on the eternal narratives — life, death, love, loss — but for her intimate reflections on her own experiences as a woman. She has threaded menstruation, pregnancy, childbirth, even post-natal depression, through the stories she tells in her presentations, which often loans them a primal power.

They’re so intensely personal that it rather begs the question: what did it take for Rocha to magic herself into a man’s mind for her first men’s collection? “I think that’s what’s really interesting, it becomes more about a role,” she muses. “It’s your own role as a woman with whoever this man is. Or the man’s role in all the women’s stories I’ve told. What is that role? What does that person bring to the table? Is it a supportive role? A negative role? I found that really stimulating to navigate.”

When I ask her whose menswear she herself responds to, the immediate answer is Rei Kawakubo. No surprise there. “And I think Martine Rose is amazing. What Craig Green does is inspiring. It’s very intellectual, but, at the root of it, incredibly emotional. The people I really respect have a strong DNA. Someone like Rick Owens, it’s very different to what we do, but it comes from their guts. They’re the only clothes those people can make. And these are the only clothes I can make.”

In that case, it’s no wonder the menswear Rocha has designed closely parallels her womenswear, in fabrication (taffeta, faille, chiffon), detailing (pearls, pearls, pearls) and construction. Consider, for example, the way that one of the most striking looks harnesses a typical Rocha dress — in tiers of ivory satin — onto the front of a black suit. There are a lot of harnesses in the collection (“harnessing emotion,” Rocha offers by way of an explanation), but she considers this particular look a utilitarian take on one of her signature pieces, probably because it looks like an elaborate apron.

To me, the overlaying of gender looks a little more curious than that. “It’s not a full commitment,” Rocha agrees. “It was really important to me that the men’s and the women’s each had their own identity, but then there was always going to be this inevitable clash between them.”

I can see what she means when she layers a tunic-y chiffon shirtdress delicately embroidered with an echinacea flower (its healing properties one of the reactions to distress that Rocha wrote about in her collection notes) over cotton drill, but most of the time, there’s no clash at all. A black tulle bomber is simply beautiful, whoever is wearing it. “I wanted there to be a real seriousness, simplicity and modernity to the men’s, with really sharp but classic tailoring, but then cross-pollinating it with these other types of things,” Rocha clarifies. “I just feel like it’s nice to be able to give something that breaks down strength with fragility and sensitivity.”

One word she comes back to is “fluidity.” It’s a fashionable enough concept that you might wonder whether Rocha is jumping on a bandwagon here. She’d be mortified by such a notion. For her, it’s simply been a matter of timing. Her non-binary sales assistants have inspired more and more men to wear her womenswear, starting with the knitwear and outerwear, then boldly going into jersey and tulle.

One look in her new collection features a tulle headpiece which harks back to the graduate collection Rocha created for professor Louise Wilson at Central Saint Martin’s. “I was influenced by the Aran Islands in Ireland, where women in mourning used to dye their petticoats red and wear them on their heads. It felt like I had to bring that into this man’s journey. It wasn’t essential, it was just, like, necessary. The right time.”

A huge cloud of tulle enveloping the head and shoulders of a man otherwise unambiguously garbed in sober black tailoring does rather have the effect of blurring — defusing, even — the clearly defined lines of his masculinity. It’s the sort of effect the female designers who do menswear best — I’m looking at you, Miuccia — excel at. Their women are towers of strength, their men are boys.

A cursory glance at the state of the world suggests defusing masculinity — at least in its most toxic form — might be the smallest step towards change for the better. “I felt like I was only going to do this if I could propose an alternative to what is the narrative,” says Rocha, which sounds to me like she agrees. Tulle is a weapon! But wait, she has other arrows in her quiver. Like a Tudor-sleeved, shawl-collared, ribbed-wrist bomber which is quite the most seductive hybrid of salon and street you’ll see in 2023, especially when paired with one of her cotton drill utilikilts (Braveheart with pockets!). Or what about a highwayman’s coat in faille brocade?

Menswear is more rules-based than womenswear. Anyone with a subversive bent should have a lot of fun breaking those rules. But Rocha isn’t so predictable. “I love that it’s strict. I like that there are so many rules, especially with the tailoring. And I’ve actually really enjoyed excavating the collision with my own work — how can it be interpreted without making it silly or frivolous? I still think it should be really beautifully done. Interesting, but not alienating.”

She called on her father, the esteemed designer John Rocha, for backup. “Dad’s been very influential. He used to show men’s in Paris in the early 90s and a lot of the tailoring came from the original blocks from his archives.” I suggest to Simone that it must be eye-opening for John to experience the evolution of menswear, from wool to tulle, so up close and personal. “Sometimes he’s, like, ‘interesting’, ‘very nice.’ But what he’s really honed in on is that it needs to fit beautifully, to feel good, to feel precise. He thought our little daisy embellishment on the suiting was very clever. I was thrilled.”

John’s already told his daughter he wants a suit. The one with the daisy embellishment? “Yeah, he said he can cover it with his hair.” Cue eyeroll.