The idea of fashion that comes out of Milan Fashion Week brings with it many new concepts, including that menswear doesn’t always have to be modern. If we were to condense in a single sentence the meaning that emerges from the presentations made by the great designers, we can answer that the proposed clothing has the merit of making people become the vintage of ourselves. The main fashion houses have re-proposed their warhorses, the strongest pieces, as if the future were a sort of huge deposit, an accumulation of objects, clothes and ideas from the past, picking up those that most ignite the nostalgia effect.
The future that emerges from these shows is a leap back into the glamor of the forties of elegant and casual actors. All the main designers of men’s fashion 2018-2019 introduce lines that have these characteristics as a common denominator. Giorgio Armani proposes a jacket marked at the waist, soft and high-waisted trousers, Dolce & Gabbanathey immerse us in a journey back even further in time, in the epic and fantastic world of fairytale kings and princes. For Versace, the next fashion collection is dedicated to the stay-at-home man, who loves to lie down on the sofa so much that the fabric pattern is tattooed on his clothes, while Marni offers blankets that can be worn with dignity, like a sort of homeless but luxurious. The future of man is a stereotype or cowboy for Dsquared, a frequenter of transgressive clubs with vinyl shorts, Moschino represents him as a jet-set traveler. A fashion that incorporates shapes, fabrics and garments that were fashionable in past decades, such as the men’s vest , both for casual and elegant fashion, such as the proposals of the well-known Milanese house Boggi Milano, for the man who never gives up on classic and elegance in every situation of the day.
Men’s fashion 2018-2019 has reversed the course, sailing backwards, with these shows of the Milan fashion week that target the stylists who are called “millennials”, the twenty-thirty-year-olds from China, Russia, Indians, Koreans, Arabs and Americans, those who are considered the new potential customers of today’s fashion. This is because, in the current view of those who produce fashion , Europeans are today too poor and unemployed to afford expenses such as those relating to haute couture garments.
This new genre of men’s fashion 2018-2019 has not failed to arouse criticism, with the Italian designers who have been labeled with the American term “playingsafe”, that is playing it safe, an attitude that allows you to have a sort of economic protection , a protection against aesthetic hazards that could instead affect the budgets. The styleused is also defined as a sort of repeat mode, an aesthetic mechanism, an archive work, of reorganization, of arrangement that reminds a feeling of melancholy to older fashion enthusiasts and experts. Even if, come to think of it, the one proposed by the stylists is not a questionable procedure: re-proposing what has already been done and that was successful years ago why shouldn’t it have it again with a new audience of consumers?