Does fashion make the people come together? For a business knocked for its supposed elitism, it’s a bold question. But in a season when brands have largely had to rely on livestreams, Giorgio Armani opened his arms to the public a little bit wider. The designer and national treasure chose to broadcast his main-line show on the Italian TV network La7 as a gesture—no doubt—of rebooting an industry bruised by the pandemic.

Armani was the first designer to cancel attendance for a fashion show when COVID-19 hit Milan in February 2020. “I suspect, as someone who has lived a life and had a great deal of experience, I have probably developed a sense of when things are genuinely serious and need a response,” the 86-year-old wrote in an email before this evening’s broadcast, which opened with a short film narrated by Italian actor Pierfrancesco Favino, revisiting Armani’s all-time most “timeless” moments.

The designer spent lockdown observing a typically regimented daily routine, which he detailed in his email. “I continued to wake up early, do some exercise, have breakfast, read the papers, and then I’d go through some emails,” went just a couple of lines from the complete account, too brilliantly extensive to publish in full. But this was his point: Armani is too much of a veteran to let a pandemic faze him. He has lived through war and built an empire that he is not about to abandon.

This season he gathered the Italian public and his international audiences around something to which they can all relate: Giorgio Armani—the longest-working designer in fashion—and the women and men who wear him. Expressing a message of timelessness central to a moment in which ideas about investment pieces and style consistency are key, Armani exercised a grayscale tone-on-tone approach to dressing, which felt universal—like a canvas for application.

“She is still concerned with looking good and feeling comfortable and confident,” Armani wrote of his post-lockdown woman. “And if anything, her desire for beauty has been sharpened by the experience of having so much beauty denied to her through having her movement and activities limited. Giorgio Armani has never been about dressing up (or down for that matter) in any conventional sense. Instead it has been, and remains, all about creating a timeless elegance that brings out the character of the wearer. That has not changed.”

On the women’s as well as the men’s side, daywear was soft, casual, crinkled: democratic tailoring, if you will. Voluminous shapes were adorned in chilly coral-like surface decoration, sumptuous and muted all at once. Slouchy pajama-like silhouettes evoked the comfort-wear adopted from quarantine. For evening, suits were sharpened and sculpted. Languid dresses looked mercurial, an effect echoed in outfits of separates in textures silky, shiny, and shimmery. It was style over fashion. And maybe it was all the silk and slo-mo, but it was somehow incredibly zen.

Now, Armani wrote, “I simply and sincerely hope that we will learn from this experience and that we will use it as an opportunity to rethink and reset. Where the industry is concerned, in my opinion, we have been due for a reckoning for a while now. Concerns like waste, the environment, too much product of poor quality, a marketing-driven approach that can lead to a disconnection with what the consumer really wants…” he paused. “I hope that fashion will now review its priorities, learning from this experience.”

“She is still concerned with looking good and feeling comfortable and confident,” Armani wrote of his post-lockdown woman.

Maison Margiela have released a masterful film presentation of their Spring 2021 Co-ed collection. Creative director John Galliano worked with mastermind image-maker Nick Knight to create the many-layered film, which is part making-of documentary and part undefinably artistic fashion presentation.

The film begins with a straightforward documentary style, depicting a video call between Galliano and Knight in which the former explains the genesis and production of the collection. Galliano’s excitement and pride are apparent as he discusses the initial process of redeveloping house codes and hunting for inspiration in secondhand shops. But his main point of inspiration for the collection, and the one from which Knight’s visual storytelling beautifully stems, was his experience of Buenos Aires’ underground tango scene.

Amazed by this encounter, Galliano imagined the story which forms the other half of the film. An old man recounts his experience with tango growing up in a recently industrialized Argentine village: the expectations of his arranged marriage are disrupted when his fiancée’s cousins – a sinisterly alluring pair of twins – arrive in the town and initiate a tango frenzy. The film’s narrative does at times lean into the fashion industry’s unfortunately popular trope of fetishizing and glamorizing poverty. The platitudinous line “people in our village were poor, but we could dance,” feels especially emblematic of this, and rather unsavory in a work that exists to sell expensive products to the world’s more affluent.

Nevertheless, this narrative is included to give an emotional content to Galliano’s designs and Nick Knight’s exquisite visuals, and this it does perfectly. The setting is a black stage covered in a shallow pool of water, where a single stark spotlight shines as if cast by the moon. The remarkable sense of depth created by this space feels perfect for the emotive choreography of the dancers who occupy it. An incredible combination of tango and contemporary dance, it feels deeply romantic and tragic. With their roots in tango dressing and their color scheme of black, white, and red, Galliano’s designs feel like excellent theatrical costuming for this performance. Knight augments the artistic elevation of it all with cinematic vignettes and expressionistic camera effects like color inversion.

These narrative and dance scenes are woven between footage and detailed description of the production process behind the collection. It is fascinating to see both people and machines at work in crafting these gorgeous pieces, especially when we hear Galliano discuss how his team conceives of the ready-to-wear collection as an industrialized extension of couture. Knight is wise enough to recognize that pulling back the curtain in fashion is more than capturing a designer rendering sketches and going through swatches of fabric. His narrative is multifaceted as we withness the 360º of the make; cuttings, tailoring, fabrication creation, silk screening, draping, hand stitching, fittings, hair and makeup meetings, choreography, styling, and more. Overlayed onscreen in kinetic motion are the names of the talents involved from Olivier Rizzo to Pat McGrath to Margiela seamstresses and shopkeeps. The enterprise of fashion creation is showcased in it’s entirety and while the viewer is drawing into the narrative surround the elderly tango artist, another set of artistry is on full display educating the viewers about the house and its processes.

Covering everything from the make of footwear to deconstructed tailoring, we also get to witness the development of Maison Margiela’s Recicla pieces, which are composed from combinations of upcycled vintage garments, is also very exciting.

But the unsung heroes of the film are its editing and sound design teams. The documentary and choreography sections could feel like completely different films, yet the editors manage to weave them together into a single creative journey. Brilliant cinematography captures the energy and precision of the construction process.

The sound design and music does incredible work in this process: the mechanical sounds of production are rhapsodically transformed into music, while the tango sections are given, of course, a beautiful and dramatic tango soundtrack. The moment these two pieces of music come together feels like a revelation.

The film is boldly ambitious in its dualistic approach to presenting the collection, and lesser creative teams may have buckled under its weight. Yet through the brilliant work of an excellent creative team, it comes together as a literal and figurative showcase of a designer’s narrative and vision. It may be the best documentary of a collection creation ever.

The Journey Of A Collection From Dream To Reality Was On Full Display In A Documentary Wrapped In The Form Of A Fantasy.

DID MAISON MARGIELA & NICK KNIGHT JUST CREATE FASHION’S GREATEST DOCUMENTARY?

As far as fashion months go, it’s been a major few weeks for runway star-in-the-making Lila Grace Moss. Just days after celebrating her 18th birthday, the daughter of Kate Moss and Dazed magazine co-founder Jefferson Hack made a blockbuster debut on Miu Miu’s SS21 catwalk. The show, which was broadcast from Milan on October 6, is the exclamation point to end an extraordinary season that’s seen the virtual FROW become something of a new normal.

From the lifestyle changes she’s making for the health of the planet to the TV show that got her and her supermodel mom through lockdown—this is your one-minute meet up with the fashion world’s brightest new star.

You’ve already worked with luminaries including David Bailey, Tim Walker, and David Sims. Which fashion creatives are you excited to collaborate with next?

I’d love to work with Gray Sorrenti and Edward Enninful.

When it comes to your own closet, which three items of clothing do you wear on repeat?

Flared jeans, a cozy jumper, and Nike Air Jordans.

If you had to pick one investment piece for autumn, what would it be?

I take my Marc Jacobs O!Mega coconut bronzer everywhere.

Who do you follow for beauty inspiration?

What’s the best tip for taking care of your skin?

Me and my mom watched [the Michael Jordan basketball documentary] The Last Dance together— we couldn’t turn it off.

Do you have a secret for getting a good night’s sleep?

Our world is undergoing enormous transformations. What three lifestyle changes have you made this year for the benefit of the planet?

Cutting down on eating meat, supporting sustainable brands, and avoiding single-use plastic wherever possible.

Is there a cause close to your heart that we can also support?

Project Zero does an amazing job of protecting our oceans.

If we could teleport you to any restaurant in the world for a celebratory post-show dinner, where would that be? And what would you order?

An amazing Japanese restaurant in Malaga [Spain] called Ta-Kumi, and I’d order everything!

KATE MOSS’S DAUGHTER LILA GRACE MAKES HER FASHION WEEK DEBUT AT MIU MIU

This season Owens showed outside of Paris for the first time in forever. It was a presentation that was “reductive,” as he put it, in at least two senses. His “skeleton” crew of around 20 colleagues and 20-ish models showed a livestreamed collection in part as pragmatic negotiation with life in the times of coronavirus: “It feels like we are able to orchestrate something with fewer instruments.”

As he said in an outtake of the filmed interview: “There is a reclusiveness, an isolation that I’ve found here that appeals to me. The beach never becomes crowded. I’ve had the same cabana for the past 10 years…and I go every morning with my coffee and I have my computer and I just work there all day. I jump in the sea and then I work and then I jump the sea.… And that’s my summer. And in recent circumstances I’ve stayed here even more: Paris has been a little bit difficult. And I decided to really buckle down and stay in Italy and kind of focus and be with the factory more…the minute the factory was able to reopen, I came right away.”That factory is in Concordia, Modena, around a three-hour drive from here—and where Owens also has an apartment (plus an Owenscorp cafeteria) to base himself in during periods of sustained focus on production. For this show, though, Owens had his team make the short hop back to the Lido to present his collection against the rationalist architecture of its Palazzo del Casinò. Aesthetically, this building’s facade is a Venetian cousin of the Palais de Tokyo, Owens’s usual Parisian venue (which was this season snapped up in his absence by Chloé). Unlike the Palais de Tokyo, the Casinò, a little like Owens himself, is a structure whose monumentally imposing exterior—“graphic severity,” as he puts it—belies an interior marked by humor and abundance: “I didn’t realize it was going to be so extravagant. There’s murals and there’s crazy Murano chandeliers, and the proportions are extreme…”

All of the fittings and last-minute prep work took place about 100 meters down the road, in the Hotel Excelsior. This is where Owens first stayed when he became a regular here. Even now, settled as he is in his nearby apartment, he maintains that Excelsior-operated cabana (which is one among hundreds being dismantled along the beach to mark the very end of summer). Built in 1908, the Excelsior is a Moorish fantasy whose starting point was the true Venetian articulations of that Arabian style, including most famously of all the Doge’s Palace: This more-ish update was built as a Disney-fied pleasure palace for the sybarites of the early 20th century. “Its legend has always captivated me,” said Owens, who cited Nijinsky dancing on the beach here as one favorite point of reference. Today both the Lido and the Excelsior are famed for playing host to the Venice Film Festival, but outside of season and festival time the hotel and its surroundings are quiet. The beachside restaurant where Owens flexes his Italian is the only one open, and only remains so because he asked its owners to keep his team in victuals during the run-up to the show.

Reference-wise, the Lido is probably best known for its key role in Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice. “It always struck a chord with me,” said Owens, who added that the book (and film) “is one of the reasons that I moved to the Lido.” Owens added: “Here’s this ascetic creator who retreats to the Lido because he’s got writer’s block. He sees a youth and he is inspired and euphoric. And then gradually, that turns into some kind of obsession…. But I think the part that resonates with me is the part about aging, and that’s a big part of the storyline. [He’s] recognizing a moment in this youth that he misses, that he misses deeply and profoundly, and maybe which he never even experienced. And he’s seeing that this golden moment is out of reach, and that he’ll never ever experience or capture it, and it turns into a degrading experience. So you have this full arc of euphoria and inspiration and stimulation that gradually corrupts until it becomes this torture.”

Parts of the beach—the beach where Mann’s Aschenbach fulfills the novel’s title—seem to be constituted entirely of dead shells. They crunch underfoot. The water is flat and limpid, and there is no visible line of horizon where it meets the sky. The air is salty, even a little dank, and seagulls bicker as diggers trundle up and down dismantling cabanas. In Death in Venice Mann describes “the limbo between creation and decay,” and his description of why Aschenbach is so drawn to this place could as easily be projected onto Owens. As Mann puts it: “His love of the sea had profound roots: the hardworking artist’s desire to rest, his longing to get away from the demanding diversity of phenomena and take shelter in the bosom of simplicity and immensity; a forbidden penchant that was entirely antithetical to his mission and, for that very reason, seductive—a proclivity for the unorganized, the immeasurable, the eternal: for nothingness.”

Of nothingness, Owens observed: “I’m not one of the pessimists who thinks that we’re going to destroy the planet. I feel like it’s going to evolve into something else, and I think it would be arrogant of us to think that we have that power…I think death is part of all of our lives and everything needs to evolve into something else. Anyway, that’s my fatalistic attitude.”

The show started five minutes after its advertised start time. The models each had two changes, which saw them becoming gradually more clothed: There is no way that Owens’s “wader” boots, platformed thigh-highs presented as a coping mechanism for the Phlegethon (river to hell) after which the collection is named, can be changed mid-livestream. Michèle Lamy watched on as Tyrone Dylan Susman and the rest of this pared-down team worked through the rack, replenishing the looks as the models returned from their fierce circuits of the piazza. Behind the rope, that straggle of spectators included an elderly couple in pastel puffa jackets, with a poodle: Owens later said they are his downstairs neighbors. Lights pulsed from inside the palace. A drone moaned above. Judd’s mix built and built to the crescendo it would never reach.

“During quarantine,” said Owens: “I noticed that speaking to a lot of friends, a lot of relationships had evolved. Our relationships with loved ones deepened, and relationships that were inessential kind of fell away. Everybody was able to have a minute to define what was most important to them, which was maybe a silver lining to that cloud.”

“Italy Is Where I Create, and Paris Is Where I Am Judged”

Things that aren’t what they seem are the norm at MM6. A jumpsuit is actually two pairs of pants, conjoined at the waist, the upper pair flipped up over the shoulders. A white dress is the brand’s signature chair cover in white muslin transposed seam for seam as a bib dress. A necklace is a giant, blown-up ring. Nearly every single item contains some kind of clever trick.

Even months of working apart over Zoom couldn’t diminish the MM6 mentality. Perhaps the distance only enhanced it. Eschewing print and color—too hard to see clearly over Zoom, a brand representative said—in favor of standard white, black, beige, and denim, the design team was left to focus on form and function. Playfulness abounds. On a legible level are the hybridized and deconstructed garments: a silk maxiskirt meant to look like a folded-down slip, a trench sliced at the waist into a skirt and jacket, the ultimate shoe pants in thigh highs that mimic the leg of a jean over an ankle boot. Then, there is the delightfully bizarre: tripartite slit leather shoes that can be worn a myriad of ways, from shoe to slipper to sandal. Amid a season of at-home mailers, MM6’s is the strangest: a metal can and string. The list of imaginative uses for it is the size of a poster.

The question is: All this weirdness to what end? Martin Margiela, the brand’s enigmatic founder, could speak directly to his moment with his subversion. What does a bifurcated MM6 studio robe say about the now? That we miss the uniformity and community of office life? (The brand’s video certainly enforces that reading.) The most compelling pieces here are not the trickiest, but the simplest. A pinstripe gray suit with cropped sleeves and wide-leg trousers is hard to resist, a piece that invites the wearer to make it weird in their own way.

We would like to present to you Leon Emanuel Blanck’s FW2021 "Spilled" collection lookbook photographed by Victor Sajenko.

Glass coated down coats with colorways reminiscent of leaking oil. Multilayered silks give an idea of blurry views of open eyes underwater. Hand-painted wild python and alligator jackets stand against transparent polyurethane parkas playing with the idea of natural versus synthetic. Latex coated baby camel wools, waxed corduroy blazers, and distressed horse and lama skins emphasize the idea of perished animals through contamination.

Clothing: Leon Emanuel Blanck / @leonemanuelblanck

Photography: Victors Sajenko / @imagenoire

Styling: Camille Naomi Franke / @camiillefr

The collection is based around the "Ersatz" series of artworks created by Leon Emanuel Blanck in 2019 dedicated to the artificiality of our lives.

“You are about to enter my head, at your own risk! Mon dieu. Be careful, it can be a very dangerous place!” John Galliano laughs, little bit joking and a little not, as he talks to us about his great “leap” on Zoom, and how he became a director. Provided that the work he did for Maison Margiela can be defined as a 'film' - and only this - and which is at the same time a documentary, a story, an interactive provocation, something sincere, pure, extravagant. 

Residents of the Paris neighborhood where Maison Margiela is based were recently surprised when they saw a drone hovering over St Joseph's church, then slip into an open window in the building opposite and disappear. The drone filmed from above Galliano and his team at work in the atelier, and is just one of the many images of the short film made for the new Artisanal collection that comes out today.

Whatever the damage that the fashion industry has suffered due to the pandemic, the boom of innovative ideas of this period, ideas that serve to talk about clothes, thoughts, exchanges of opinion, and humanity in a broad sense, is bringing quickly to a real revolution. “Very soon I realized that fashion, as we have presented and done it so far, would never be the same again,” says Galliano. “ It won't be until a vaccine is found. And only when I accepted this new reality within myself, was I able to welcome the idea that something new could happen, that we could really change things, have new ideas, be resourceful, and this rekindled my enthusiasm. Nothing can ever hinder the course of creativity, I will not allow this to happen!”

From an emotional point of view, Galliano has, in practice, overturned his mindset , the one that for years made him create "behind closed doors" and defined his personal safety zone and the codes of anonymity of Maison Margiela. Now, however, he has decided that he will show the world every single phase of the creation of the collection, in the smallest detail, with only some very special twists within his storytelling. “I thought, 'I'll be completely transparent.' I've always been afraid of appearing in front of the lens, and all those things you do when you know it's aimed at you, but I decided I was ready. And so I called Nick Knight , to whom I am very attached, and in whom I have great confidence."

The result? Two months of shooting documenting every move by Galliano and his team in every possible format. “I wanted to document the whole process in an almost voyeuristic way. Nick caught me from afar. There were drones flying around us, in and out of my conversations. And I was wearing two GoPro cameras, one on my head, one on my chest. " Knight also put together the calls on Zoom, the messages on the phone, the calls on FaceTime, he used the thermal camera and even an X-ray app, whatever tool could capture the details of my work, up close and from afar.”

“It was a completely new and very fun journey,” Galliano exclaims. And partly the technology has somehow returned to the collection. “It influenced the way I chose fabrics for some of the clothes, it was a really creative way of working. But, of course, a lot of the scenes are in real-time, with real clothes, because I think today you want to see real things too. I asked the kids to bounce back on their iPads at the start of the pandemic. They showed their experiments by cutting fabrics in 3D on the kitchen table, on the balcony, in the garage. In reality, it all started like this.”

This is the John Galliano narrator. But there must have been something else too. “I wanted to insert a double story”, he reflects. “There is the story of the collection, but inserted within a thriller. Because? Because I like the genre, I like horror movies and thrillers, and how they are built. And because for me, the thriller is the thrill of creation, research, discovery.”

The second part of the short film was instead shot in the Cotswolds, England, and follows the timeline (beginning-end) of the creative process, which goes from the creation of the garment to the shooting. An intense experience that, due to the safety regulations and the lockdown, brought the team together very much. “We had to be in a group on set, live together, eat together, all sleep in the same place. And then, suddenly, I can't explain it, the magic exploded. My muses have become interpreters of a force, I don't know where it came from. They were there, they lived this thing, all together: my clan, my tribe, all six of them. I wanted a connection to be made between them. When you see them in motion and they communicate 100% what they are wearing, there were times when I had to leave the set, for what I saw and felt, it was so exciting that I had to walk away ”.

And all those preconceived ideas about the digital representation of fashion, which leaves no room for emotion? Galliano today considers them obsolete. “Filming is stimulating, intellectually and emotionally. Many continue to say, 'How can an emotion be transmitted digitally?' Well, I think the emotion was palpable”. What came out, he says, is a sort of “prototype” for the future, which can be used “to activate different types of dialogue, and to make generations Y and Z understand in detail how we do things. How we created the fabrics ourselves, also from the interlinings, the way we overlap the fabrics, and how we created our embroideries, in short, how we industrialized ourselves, how we became enterprising."

Maison Margiela Artisanal Co-Ed Fall 2020 Couture Collection Fashion Show

Provided that the work he did for Maison Margiela can be defined as a 'film' - and only this - and which is at the same time a documentary, a story, an interactive provocation, something sincere, pure, extravagant. 

MAISON MARGIELA ARTISANAL CO-ED FALL 2020 COUTURE COLLECTION 🇫🇷

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