It was for this show that Michele remade his predecessor Tom Ford’s famous red velvet suit. Nonetheless, I’m fascinated by Michele’s pivot to suiting, which began around the time of his anniversary show in April of last year, when he launched the “hacking” project with Balenciaga, which saw both designers borrow the signatures of the other and plaster them with the other’s logo. You put it on, look professional and comfortable, and go.īut that was seven years ago, and fashion crowds expect something new. “You don’t need much to adapt them to masculine or feminine bodies,” Michele said of the suit, which is what makes good tailoring successful. The silhouette appeared again and again throughout the show with great little tweaks on men and women with all different looks-in mousy, academic corduroy on a dude with Harry Styles’s Adonis hair in a subtle Gucci monogram print in Wall Street gray on a woman in a beanie and, my personal favorite, in olive glen plaid with a fur lapel, worn by a mod smirking under a knit beret. That opening suit is technically a men’s suit, “with the neatness, the rigor of menswear,” Michele said, but was shown on a woman, and will presumably be styled and merchandised as such. “The line is so straight and neat on a men’s suit,” he said. He said the women on his team often express admiration for menswear and love wearing men’s suits. “I like, for instance, breakfast-the ritual of breakfast, waking up.” The creative director also discussed this new focus on suiting. “I’m not a nostalgic person, because I really like life,” he opined at one point. In a press conference after the show, Michele perched in a green velvet chair and extemporized on just about everything. It was an expression of Hollander’s thesis that the suit isn’t just the perfect garment, but Western culture’s premiere fashion achievement. Although they were dressed in a totally classic suit (and the preferred jacket style of cartoon millionaires everywhere), they looked more contemporary, more at ease, than many models I’ve seen on the runway lately, where fantasy has dominated. The model’s hands were slung in their trouser pockets, and their chin was tipped upward eyes half-closed behind sunglasses, suggesting a kind of checked-out bliss. I thought about Sex and Suits as soon as I saw the first look in Gucci’s fall 2022 show in Milan on Friday: a navy double-breasted suit with loose but not billowing trousers on a model with seafoam-green hair, giant gold earrings, and a pair of black pointy pumps that looked like the best $250 you ever spent at a secondhand shop. In Suits, she posits that the suit is the most evolved expression of modernity in fashion history, since it is universally flattering and easy to move in, while womenswear constantly changes to reinterpret old-fashioned ideas and fantasies about femininity and womanhood. Hollander, along with Elizabeth Wilson (whose Adorned in Dreams I’ll also heartily plug), was one of the first academics to make the case for fashion as a subject worthy of intellectual interrogation. People who are just starting to dig into fashion history often ask me for reading recommendations, and my answer has been the same since I started this journey myself a decade ago: Anne Hollander’s slim volume Sex and Suits.
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