Larry in Burberry is Beside the Weather’s fashion correspondent. He analyzes fashion trends for common wearers of clothes. He dreams of IKEA-inspired Balenciaga bags but still puts his furniture together himself.
Think of Larry in Burberry like Damsel in Dior’s work husband, who she really loves but sometimes gets annoyed with because he goes too all out on the 4th of July. Follow Larry on Insta here.
Milan is located in Italy’s northern Lombardy region, and similar to the great Packer’s coach of the same name, it brought out the best in everyone.
Milan Fashion Week was a colorful clash of time, space, tech, thought and science fiction. Memes and manifestos merged. Drones and ’70’s tones shared airspace. Reunions and nostalgia made us reminisce about times when we could still fit in a henley.
The home of The Last Supper saw many of fashion’s top disciples combine delicious looks with food for thought. Let’s feast.
Gucci Went Gucci
The Gucci show was easily head and shoulders above the rest. The scene resembled a dream crossover TV event between Game of Thrones, The Walking Dead, Chicago Med and America’s Next Top Model (Now THAT would be a real crossover NBC Chicago franchise). Sarah Mower from Vogue describes it differently:
“A procession of transhumans, walking in trancelike step through a suite of operating theaters: Bolted together from the clothing of many cultures, they were Alessandro Michele’s metaphor for how people today construct their identities—a population undergoing self-regeneration through the powers of tech, Hollywood, Instagram, and Gucci. It was sensational—in a disturbing and creepy way—as it set out to probe truths around fashion as a medium for transmitting inner states: a picture of what is happening as human brains have become irradiated in the LED light of the information age.”
Creative Director Alessandro Michelle described his thought process:
“We are the Dr. Frankenstein of our lives,” said Michele. “There’s a clinical clarity about what I am doing. I was thinking of a space that represents the creative act. I wanted to represent the lab I have in my head. It’s physical work, like a surgeon’s.
We exist to reproduce ourselves, but we have moved on. We are in a post-human era, for sure; it is under way. Now, we have to decide what we want to be.”
Michele, speaking in a press conference he named Cyborg (I wish NFL coaches would name their press conferences. This is called U2 because we set the Edge out there today), said he was inspired by reading the feminist philosopher Donna Haraway’s 1984 “A Cyborg Manifesto: Science, Technology, and Socialist-Feminism in the Late Twentieth Century.”
You should read it. In irradiated-Wikipedia-brain short, the essay is a critique of identity politics and the idea that people must fit within predefined cultural boundaries. It’s insane it was written in 1984 given all that’s happening today.
All together now!
Only Gucci Can Go from Manifestos to Memes
Inspired by the Gucci models walking with their own heads, the trancelike transhumans of Instagram quickly created the #GucciChallenge, a meme fashionistas participated in with varying degrees of success.
A Unibrow Excited the Frow
Instagram sensation Sophia Hadjipanteli of Cyprus also wowed at Gucci, with her own head stealing the show. Similar to her eyebrows, the excitement around her look naturally flows together into a power rankings of all-time unibrows.
#1: Fran from Dodgeball
#2: Bert
#3: Sophia Hadjipanteli
#4: Anthony Davis
The Tod’s Show Continued the Unexpected Accessories Trend
PETA got mad at Tod’s for including puppies in their show, but even our furry friends have a pawsion for fashion. Here’s Larry’s dog Teddy with her Chewy Vuitton.
Holy Chic – Dolce & Gabbana Show Used Drones in a Church
Here are @dolcegabbana’s Nice Boys pic.twitter.com/lrA7KLUPJP
— Tyler McCall (@eiffeltyler) February 25, 2018
The most literal buzz at Milan Fashion Week came from Dolce & Gabbana, The D&G show was staged in a classic Italian Catholic Church, and the eight drones carrying handbags down the runway immediately increased the brand’s mass appeal. (Hallelujah there wasn’t a priest droning on, amirite?)
Most of the looks demonstrated amazing grace, but not sure Noah would have allowed this on his arc.
And Lord have mercy on D&G after this (might be time for a confession!).
Tommy Hilfiger X Gigi Hadid Revved Everyone’s Engines
Tommy Hilfiger collaborated with Gigi Hadid on his Fall/Winter collection. Hilfiger has been praised for capitalizing on the see-now-buy-now moment, and the revival of ’90’s nostalgia and big logos on everything has also been serendipitous.
Speaking of nostalgia, here’s me wearing a Tommy polo I saw and bought at the outlet mall in a college dance off.
About Tommy’s Milan show, WWD wrote “The dusty old fairground was outfitted with a racetrack set worthy of the “Fast and the Furious” franchise.
As Roman would say in Furious 7 when Ramsey describes him as a joker…WRONG.
If that were true, Tommy’s runway would have been 29 miles long like at the end of Fast & Furious 6.
Gigi looked great, but let’s get serious, most of Hilfiger’s collection would have been laughed right out of Race Wars.
I mean come on, who wore the red midriff-highlighting top better: Hilfiger model Grace Elizabeth or Letty?
Pretty obvious.
The only aspect of the TH even semi-Fast & Furious-related was that the hot felon Jeremy Meeks walked.
He actually looks like a FF villain. Look out Owen Shaw. Maybe in FF28 (Fash & FURious) the hot felon is an international fur dealer.
Okkkkk, that’s it from Milan. What an inspirational week. As we leave the Lombardy region and move to Paris, I’ll leave you with an inspirational quote about winning not from Vin Lombardi but from Vin Diesel, as re-enacted by the YouTube account 10 Second Car.