Saturday, September 4, 2010

For the host: Flashes of light

With every new season that opens, fashion will demonstrate some bright moments and a full international compliment of train-wrecks-come-clothing. No fooling: All those collections you thought were hideous in many cases, were. Or only meant to be appreciated for their ability to wake up the fashion writers who actually truly cover the stuff from the third row and are dozing over their triple shot espressos from town to town around the world for weeks on end.

Or the apparel is meant to transcend actual customers and actual revenue and catapult into a museum before the retails season ends, or one actual dollar is made. But look, runway is promotion, for the most part, it is not sales. Nor is it much fun for those involved; a sedative- laced roller coaster of fear punctuated with pin-stabs and screeching designers.

So, maybe you've noted, it can be hare-brained madness.

Anyhow, this is to say you are not just whistlin' dixie. Oh, how I have been there. If it seems runway fashion was by the few for even fewer, I promise you that the late night I spent helping to fit a rubber splash-painted Jackson Pollock-like number to a twig only proves your reasoning is sound.

But once in a while, in the great Spring, 2011 race down the runway, there were flashes of light. Or, more specifically, orange. In menswear! Honestly, I nearly skipped around my desk.

Ahhhhhh, the sweet vision of relief from gray, steel gray, dove gray, white, and black from an Italian family house that never fails me, Ermenegildo Zenga, which celebrated its one hundredth anniversary with this collection.

"The show closed on white, not just lightness, but a blank canvas on which to create another century. When the label's current caretakers, Gildo, Anna, and Paolo Zegna, brought their father Angelo, Ermenegildo's son, onto the catwalk for a bow, the audience took the only reasonable course of action. It rose to its feet and cheered."

- vogue.com







Photos: style.com

2 comments:

Reggie Darling said...

Very nice post, Blushing. I love your take on the fashion world, laughed out loud at it. And you are right, the Zegna clothes are good looking. The cut of the jackets are marvelous, but I think the trousers could in some cases use some help. I agree with you, I think there is more of interest in what I'm seeing for men's clothes these days, than women's.

Genuine Lustre said...

Oooo - good stuff. Love that pale blue sportcoat.