Liberating the Lady at Ferragamo and Bottega Veneta
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What does it mean to look classic?
Thankfully, we live in a time when everyone can have their own answer to that question. But it poses an interesting challenge for a designer, especially Maximilian Davis, the 27-year-old Brit who showed his second collection for Ferragamo on Thursday. Ferragamo is a conservative brand, still family-run—several family members, including a few not much older than toddlers, were packed into the front row, gleefully shaking hands with a radiant Uma Thurman wearing a suede suit from Spring 2023. It’s known for its understated bags and shoes (a grandmother in a Vara pump is just about as classic as fashion gets), and its previous creative directors have tended towards inoffensive sportswear.
Enter Davis, who refuses to merely appease. Davis's own community is young, global, and creative; they are today's tastemakers. Model Richie Shazam and Hood By Air co-founder Shayne Olivier both attended the show and hovered around their friend backstage. But rather than just taking from his own world and Ferragamo's more traditional one (“I was inspired by the way my friend wore a skirt,” or whatever platitudes designers often spill backstage), Davis is really creating his own language. It’s a revision of ladylike style that feels wholly contemporary, mostly because he is following his own remarkably fine-tuned instincts.
Backstage, the designer said he is continuing to look at the 1950s, as he did last season, and updating that era for today. He opened with a series of looks combining black and navy—the classic fashion faux pas, almost a catty wink at runway provocations and bourgeois standards—with a serene navy rounded car coat as the opening salvo. So confident, but not arrogant. Understated, but not whispering. I'd love to hear him hold forth on glamor. He had a number of dresses or tops with 1950s bodices or necklines—a mutton sleeve and mockneck, or a dipping U-shaped plunge, or just a great jacket, with a fitted sleeve and buttons placed just off the to side—but instead of the full, clunky crinoline skirt or tight pencil those silhouettes often feature, he turned them into minidresses or styled them with hot pants. Rather than try-hard, it was a gorgeous gesture of paring back.
Other moments were simply killer updates of the good stuff: a bushy leopard coat (shearling) with a leopard-print shoe and boxy bag, or the back dress, with a gold chain in the back and a plunging rounded neckline in shearling. Not a lick of the collection was performative. These are clothes for the woman who's committed not to the look, but to the life.
It really speaks to the designer’s talent that he can make the standout garment of the collection the little black dress. Davis isn’t reinventing the wheel. He seems like someone who both understands his own generation and knows how to articulate their needs and values, and he has his own point-of-view. There are a lot of young designers stepping into creative director roles at European houses lately: Rhuigi Villaseñor at Bally and Davis last season, plus Harris Reed at Nina Ricci and Ludovic de Saint Sernin at Ann Demuelemeester debuting in Paris this week. Davis seems less like a Gen Z whisperer and more like a savant, with a wholly original perspective on how to look polished and fabulous in this time. As I examined his jackets in the showroom the day after the show, I noticed little details like the slanted buttonholes, or a beautiful white cummerbund on a tuxedo pant. These are pieces that you’ll have forever because they feel distinctive and special. That he understands how to make such clothing at his age is a testament to his singularity.
The lady is clearly on many designers’ minds. The Gucci show on Friday was packed with quirky spins on the ladylike uniform—a shrunken Chanel-inspired suit, for example, and colorful sheer slips over clashing pantyhose (with a thong visible underneath), and feather gowns and kitten heels. There were a lot of Tom Fordisms, and his Gucci woman was definitely one twisted lady. Incoming creative director Sabato de Sarno doesn’t even start his job until this spring (his first collection will debut in September), so these clothes were done by the in-house studio, clearly a group of young people designing in loving deference to their departed leader Alessandro Michele. (The large studio team actually came out at the end for the bow, and were, indeed, all wonderfully young.) If the show felt scattered, so what? There’s no creative lead to give them a mandate. And I felt that old familiar Gucci tug, to go home and put on my unmatching pastels and inappropriately decadent hat, and take myself out for a glass of champagne.
Where even to begin with the rhapsodic Bottega Veneta? Saturday’s show was the third and final chapter in Matthieu Blazy’s trilogy of collections about Italy. It was joyfully stuffed with vividly executed ideas and characters, but it never felt merchandised (buy this bag!) or too rich. (I mean in the sense of eating two or three pieces of cake for dessert; not in the sense of one’s pockets, which must be deep to afford the Bottega look.) Look after look was a marvel: a men’s knit tie and shirt paired with knit pants constructed to look pinstriped, and next, a party dress made of leather paillettes the color of avocado. There were tweedy day dresses, a clutch of adorable embroidered pieces inspired by motifs in Botticelli paintings, a dress embroidered with Murano glass beads. There were three-foot-long triangular intrecciato bags and rubber sandal pumps inspired by Venetian glass and strange fitted dresses and skirts made of tight knits with wavy patches of loose, fringed yarn (Blazy loves mermaids, he reminded us backstage). Suit jackets became tops. Underthings became dresses. Boxers became leather shorts. Panties became opera gloves! (Trust me!)
Backstage, Blazy spoke about the show being a day on the street, a kind of parade of the typical Italian city street where “there is no hierarchy,” and “you encounter strangers and they really amaze you.” Maybe it’s the way they carry their bag, or their beautiful profile, or their gorgeous hair, or the way they’ve layered their coats or turned some completely boring garment into something weird and delightful, which Blazy said is fascinating even when it doesn’t quite work. (Few things are more fun than a designer finding inspiration in what looks bad.) Blazy’s two previous collections had this kind of realism, but those were more pragmatic, with the flannel shirts and jeans that were actually leather. Here, he let his imagination go wild, picturing the show as a celebratory parade (with the charging music to match). The clothes became more fantastical, with the type of mischievous details that are fascinating to a passerby, and tantalizingly suggestive about the person within the clothes, but whose truth is known only to the wearer.
Blazy also spoke about how this collection was an investigation of chic—something that intrigued me about his last collection, too, when I wrote that the designer was resurrecting a lost meaning of the word. “Do we start to become chic in the morning at home?” he mused, referencing the opening looks that remade pajamas and sock slippers in leather. “Are we chic when we wear something that is almost costume-like?”
I think this collection went beyond chic, actually, into a touchingly humanist view of city life and style’s role in it. So much clothing has become about the wearer only—how it feels on the body and the message the wearer wants to broadcast—and neglecting any consideration of clothing as a language, as a transactional thing. I tell you something about me with my coat, let’s say, and you form an opinion about it, whether we both know it or not. Fashion is an essential component of civic life, connecting every person on the street. The pandemic made us forget about that. But differences and personalities are what make a city; ideas and aesthetics clash and converge. In Blazy's collection, the clothing became more and more inventive and outrageous (I could feel the people around me swooning), and then he ended the show with a model in his now-famous jeans and tank top. “The idea was to close the chapter,” he said. “It’s like a loop. And maybe they will start again.” What an optimistic message for a fashion show—that the routine of city life is not a daily grind but a daily parade, populated by strangers whose unusual looks open our minds and delight us over and over.
Blazy took inspiration from the 1950s too, with his coats and a few sack suits and all those wasp-waisted dresses. Lots of brands have been showing boxy little handbags. It’s a great theme this season, to look back at the 1950s, a time when the world was not better, but things generally were. Household products, clothes, furniture—it was all of a higher quality. Perhaps that explains the urge to examine that decade. I doubt this will be the last we see of it, but of what we’ve seen so far, the execution is far from the conservative attitude that defined the period. Instead, we're seeing a terrific perversion of the ladylike classics.
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