Milan Fashion Week’s Personality Transplant
Milan Fashion Week opened with a jolt. We were inside an operating theatre with antiseptic green walls and piercing surgery lights positioned over hospital beds. Out came the ‘transhumans’, a sombre procession of mutants with eyes on the back of their hands, two carried replicas of their own heads, another cradled a baby dragon… Operation Cyborg will probably go down in fashion history as one of the weirdest and boldest shows ever to have hit a Milan catwalk. ‘ We are the Dr Frankenstein of our lives,’ said surgeon-in-chief, creative director Alessandro Michele, aka the Gucci brand’s defibrillator. Michele had buried his own head in feminist philosopher Donna Haraway’s 1984 A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology And Socialist-feminism In The Late Twentieth Century. He has always played with fashion genetics – masculine-feminine, cross-cultural,
historical-modern – but this was next-level stuff. A metaphor for how humans today construct their identities inside and out. Visually translated, it was a boundarybreaking smash-up of stereotypes: nerdy city suits, ‘ I, Tonya’ sequins, spangly Hollywood glamour, Elton John shell suits, Scottish tweeds, New York Yankees logos, kimonos, folk, boho – you name it, it was all zealously accessorised with baseball caps, a pagoda hat, balaclavas, headscarves, burkas, turbans – on woman, man, hybrid, whatever. It was pure fashion provocation. And it set the tone (and bar) for the rest of Milan.
That same night, Moschino presented a cavalcade of Jackie Kennedys in matchy-matchy 1960s skirt suits and pill-box hats. Moschino’s designer, Jeremy Scott (an American from Kansas) decided to run with a bonkers conspiracy theory that Jackie Kennedy had knocked off both Marilyn Monroe and President Kennedy and was, in fact, an alien – that’s why the models had extra-terrestrial skin tones of turquoise, orange, pink and yellow. Now back on planet Earth, Jackie O was going to wreak havoc in her tweed twinsets and repel Donald Trump’s position on illegal aliens – presumably by bumping him off, too.
Hold on, had Milan Fashion Week had a total personality transplant? Where was the high-octane glamour, the ritz, the glitz, the sex? Ah, yes, sex, it’s a tough gig in this day and age, in the post-weinstein era of #Metoo and Time’s Up. It was there, albeit tempered. Donatella Versace followed up last season’s epic homage to her brother Gianni by diving further into the dazzling archives of pop art prints and body-con, only this time models showed less flesh and more headscarves and leggings. Dolce & Gabbana sent out corseted wiggle dresses (and drones that flew down the catwalk carrying their latest bags), but they were barely noticeable since they threw everything they love into one mega greatest hits collection, titled ‘Fashion Devotion’.