High fashion during lockdown: Loungewear in the spotlight on the Milan catwalks
The traditional stereotype of the Italian bell’uomo includes a very particular sense of style: pin-sharp shirts, tight-fitting, tailored trousers, perhaps a racy pair of driving shoes and hair slicked to the nth degree, all the better for slipping on that Vespa helmet.
But thanks to lockdown, these sartorial favourites seem to have been traded for slippers, long johns and dressing gown-style coats that can be worn from the bedroom to the daily sanctioned stroll to the shops.
With the world turned on its head, that was the message from Milan men’s fashion week autumn/winter 2021 - showcased via digital catwalk presentations this weekend - where designers were clearly inspired by the sofa-ready uniforms to which we’ve all become accustomed.
The first indication that the catwalks would not be Business Smart As Usual came when Ermenegildo Zegna, the historic Italian men’s tailoring institution, kick started proceedings.
Alongside airy, soft structure suiting and sculptural coats, designer Alessandro Sartori experimented with plump padding and jackets that cinched in the middle with robe-like ties.
As well as wool versions in black and biscuit colours, the designer also created a tufted version, like teddy bear fur rendered in the most luxurious materials. Sartori, who usually turns his eye to different interpretations of the suit, instead looked to slippers - outfitting every single model in suede moccasins lined in shearling. The man who might once have been pounding the pavements in solid leather monkstraps is set to take a cosier, more sedentary approach.
The relaxation of our daily wardrobes has been one of the side-effects of the pandemic and the work-from-home set-up that it has enforced, to the detriment of tailoring and shirting brands who have suffered huge losses, and in some cases shut altogether.
With men no longer buying suits for office life, loungewear has become the staple - Google searches for that very term increased 488% last year. Venturing beyond our front door in anything close to pyjamas used to be the get-up of slatterns and students; now it’s entirely commonplace. This approach was reflected in Fendi’s menswear show, who took "turn-in" attire and applied its rarefied, luxury hand. Bed clothes with a billionaire client in mind, if you will, and sartorially-inclined rather than slovenly.
Dressing gowns, worn in the manner of coats with trousers and knits, swaddled models, from a silk jacquard creation with plumply padded collar, riddled in multicoloured illustrations, to a quilted black version and one in soft baby blue.
Silvia Fendi elevated the notion of indoor dressing, with piping on the edge of suits nodding to the stylistic codes of traditional pyjamas. An electric pink coat with a diagonal padded pattern, with matching padded trousers, couldn’t help but call to mind some sort of fantastical sleeping bag.
That sense of the intimate was the main theme of the Prada show, in which designer Miuccia Prada - in her second season collaborating with Belgian menswear titan Raf Simons - outfitted every model in the show in knitted long johns.
“There’s something very up close and personal about them, which felt symbolic for how we feel now,” said Simons. The collection, which was heavily weighted towards knitwear, also explored knitted body suits, although Mrs Prada demurred from referring to them as ‘romper suits’.
“I’ve been calling them ‘body pieces’, because ‘romper’ sounds very childlike. Either way, I was interested in the way they show off the body but conceal it,” she said.
These were about as far from the ubiquitous - and much maligned - onesie as could be; slick and lean of proportion, clinging to the body. Indoors attire turned into something altogether more sensual.
The show was staged in a series of rooms lined in tufted pink fluff, a nod to the tacticility and touch that are black listed now; “it’s about feeling, about tactile, about a certain warmth.”
Even in the technical nylon fabrics - a hallmark of Prada’s outerwear - linings came in a weighty fabric that called to mind tapestry carpet materials, and pastel-shaded coats came with textured surfaces.
Zinging bright leather gloves adorned many over the models, each with their own coin purse on the back; contactless accessorising in the most impactful way. It’s indicative that saturated, rainbow-bright colour - particularly in autumn/winter clothes that tend to be more sedate and moody in their palette - has appeared in such vibrancy across the Milan catwalks.
Not only in the bubblegum pink coats, canary yellow and play dough purples at Prada, but in the primary bright corals, bottle greens and cobalt blues at Fendi. “Colour can be a symbol of possibility,” said Miuccia Prada of the hopeful paintbox hues.
Brighter days are on the horizon, clearly, but until then the laid back, softly-softly dress codes of lockdown life look set to stay, albeit in high fashion form.
