Despite Italian fashion industry professionals announcing the other day that the atmosphere in Milan was happy and optimistic, there was a palpable tension hanging in the air yesterday. The reason wasn’t actually connected with any sort of financial crisis perennially looming on the Italian fashion industry, but it was about the Tommaso Aquilano and Roberto Rimondi saga. At Milan Fashion Week the duo presented their own first collection under their names.
But AR’s Spring/Summer 09 fashion show marked the end of their involvement with 6267, the successful brand they worked on for a few years, supported by Italian clothing company Castor. Abruptly left behind by the two young designers who decided to seek new glories with Ferré and with their own brand, Castor (a company that bet on Martin Margiela as soon as the maison started and when nobody wanted to) claimed they didn’t feel angry, but were instead rather sad at how they had been treated. The event cast a bit of a dark shadow on Aquilano-Rimondi’s first collection.
Allegedly inspired by Elsa Schiaparelli and completely different from the architectural creations the young designers did for Ferré, this collection was based on more relaxed forms. Schiap was present more in the extravagant mood of the collection than in the clothes, though there were echoes of the infamous "Commedia dell’Arte" and circus collection in the velvet fezzes, Lurex tops and cropped pants.
There were interesting intuitions here and there and wearable silky dresses that flickered fluidly on the models’ bodies, but you couldn’t do without noticing that maybe their best efforts went into the Ferré collection and that, from now on, AR need to pay a bit more attention to their collection if they don’t want to risk losing their newly-gained independence.
The second moment of resentment yesterday happened at Jil Sander‘s: with a catwalk scheduled on the same day as Prada, Sander’s doomed connection with the Italian group was still looming in many journalists’ minds. The German label, founded in the mid-’70s, was sold eight years ago to the Prada Group. A while back Sander fell out with Prada and terminated her contract and now the company is the hands of its new Japanese owners with Belgian designer Raf Simons as creative director.
Simons, though, successfully managed to calm down the troubled spirits thanks to his minimalist inspirations. The tribal theme was at the back of his mind when he designed this collection as Man Ray’s famous photograph of Kiki de Montparnasse with and African sculpture in the background proved, but the influence was filtered through the designer minimal and androgynous style.
Though his jackets with asymmetrical shapes were impeccable, Simons’ merit stood in having reinvented the flapper girl, updating her look, draping the traditional fringes of her dress horizontally rather than vertically and applying them also on bags. The best dresses were the black ones in which the fringes created incision-like effects that left parts of the body exposed. 
Moschino relieved the darkest moments of the day with a fun collection. There was again a hint of Schiaparelli’s surrealism in the giant dresses used as props, but also in giant ruffles, roses and bows that decorated the dresses and in the by now extremely overused Harlequin print recycled this time in black and white for both trousers and dresses. Bows also gave a novelty shape to over-sized leather clutches decorated with rhinestone clasps that echoed Schiap’s extravagant jewellery.
There’s a still few days to go before the end of Milan Fashion Week and for the time being while the tension has gone, hypotheses, speculations and conjectures are already being made about the next designer who will be chosen to work on 6267, a brand that the people at Castor don’t want to see dying. For my part I’d like to see a young designer taking the place left by Aquilano and Rimondi, somebody able to inject into the brand a new freshness and bring it to new heights.
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Fashion is such a tricky industry to predict, because what is here today is gone tomorrow. Regardless, it’s fun to guess what’s going to be “in” for the various season.