Milano Moda Uomo: Bottega Veneta, Frankie Morello, Gucci, Vivienne Westwood, Neil Barrett, Gianfranco Ferré, Versace, Giuliano Fujiwara |

Bottega Veneta’s Spring/Summer 2010 collection could be summarised with a statement: boys, or rather men, just want to have fun.

The brand’s pièces de résistance – its large intrecciato bags – appeared on the catwalk in their bi-coloured version, alternated to crocodile skin bags in intense aquamarine.

Yet Tomas Maier must have felt men need to inject more than just a little bit of colour in their wardrobes, hence the tie dye scarves, blazers and pin-striped jackets and the suits in bright lacquered red and dark purple worn with matching scarves.

Jackets had sharp pagoda style shoulders, a very modern and trendy detail in otherwise classical garments, structured following the principles of the Neapolitan tailoring school (will write more about it in a future post, promise…).

The sporty/casual, yet luxurious look prevailed as the leather baseball bombers, soft jumpers, military green shorts and jackets in light techno fabrics or with asymmetrical zips also showed.

Crumpled fabrics contrasted with the gentle elegance of flower printed jackets and shiny patent leather shoes. The message seemed to be very simple: no need to tone down your style, wear dull clothes and say goodbye to creativity, even in times of crisis.

Hence the cropped trousers that let a short purple sock with a little red butterfly be seen and the printed intarsia trousers. And if you really need to tone things down for what regards colours, Maier seemed to warn, opt for a deep blue classic double-breasted jacket worn with a pair of denim trousers.

The ironic brand Frankie Morello usually successfully manages to make fashion critics and journalist forget that you can be as theatrical as you can during a catwalk show, yet what counts, at the very end, is the product you are trying to sell.

Transporting the audience to a gentleman’s club, the brand presented a mainly sport inspired collection that featured juvenile delinquents turned baseball players, glamorous golf players and dandified polo players and jockeys wearing shirts and jackets criss-crossed by fetishistic yet essentially useless harnesses. The trompe l’oeil jumpers with boy scout scarves or harnesses would have been interesting if they hadn’t been the umpteenth reinvented and renovated version of Schiaparelli’s seminal Armenian jumper (yawn).

Sport was also on Frida Giannini’s mind when she designed the new Gucci collection and there were genuine moments when you thought that, at least for this time, men were safe from excessive amounts of glamour.

Light parkas in techno fabrics or with mesh inserts and perforated details, trousers and sleeveless jackets inspired by scuba-diving suits, translucent swim trunks and bags in rubbery materials genuinely made you hope for a new direction that mixed the brand's historical experience with the current advanced discoveries and developments in terms of fabrics.

Even the jackets, trousers and shirts with printed motifs inspired by tapestry-woven carpets and rugs were acceptable, but it was instead slightly unnecessary to see on the runway shiny suits in bright shades of blue and pink, proving that glam is for Giannini and her fans an irresistible state of mind.

Eye patches, tricorn hats and nautical motifs made you think that Vivienne Westwood was trying once again to channel the pirate look. But Joker face painting, sardonic smiles traced on the upper lips of the models, a few fetishistic whips and Robin Hood and Zorro hats revealed there were further inspirations behind this collection.

In fact there were maybe too many inspirations, too many looks and a significant absence of coherence. Quite nice and sensible white, black and charcoal suits, check trench coats, striped drop-crotch trousers and original knitwear with intarsia of big cat’s eyes were indeed obscured by the amount of runway looks. Keeping it shorter would have been probably more effective, as Neil Barrett proved.

Playing on perfect symmetries and geometries Barrett came up with a collection that featured perfectly cut double-breasted mackintoshes in three different shades of grey and long jackets and shirts that contributed to pleasantly elongate the silhouette.

Barrett’s tailoring skills were at the bottom of the entire collection that was also characterised by soft leather panels applied with a special technique onto thin jersey shirts and jackets.

It was interesting to see how in some cases the leather panels gave particular garments an almost sculptural feel, obscuring the rest of the outfits and in particular the jackets, shirts and trousers with prints of Baroque swirls that looked almost out of place in such a clean and aesthetically pleasant collection.

Though Tommaso Aquilano and Roberto Rimondi tried to reduce the cumbersome silhouette they used for their Gianfranco Ferré’s A/W 09 collection, their second menswear collection still showed an unnecessary rigidity of forms.

Lapels were reduced, volumes were slimmer, but shoulders were rather sharp and garments seemed to be a bit too formal. They made an effort at softening it all up with denim jackets, military green overalls and bush jackets, but should have maybe avoided the nautical shirts with the golden embroidered logo of the maison.

While for what regards the womenswear collections, Aquilano and Rimondi have more or less found their path to enlightenment and maybe even a way to inject new life into the historical maison, menswear might still be a tricky spot.

I must admit that I wasn’t too confident in what Versace’s menswear collection had to offer. In my mind I tend to file many major Italian fashion houses under the same (glitzy/glam/pretentious/for people with lots of money and not much taste) category.

Alexandre Plokhov managed instead to do the trick by offering as main inspiration the story of an adventuresome French Foreign Legionnaire who adapts his wardrobe to the desert climate and to the fashion of the tribes he meets.

The collection verged more or less on the explorer’s theme seen already at Ermenegildo Zegna and Missoni's, with loosely fitting djellabas used also as evening wear, little bags tied around the waist and bamboo printed ochre leather panels applied on jumpers.

Details were interesting, especially the intrecciato motif appearing on the shoulders of vest tops, but brightly coloured T-shirts with prints of crocodile skin, an alligator jacket and a few rather unoriginal pieces of jewellery may have been avoided (though these will probably become bestsellers among Versace aficionados…).

Giuliano Fujiwara’s creative director Masataka Matsumura provided a safe landing for his menswear collection: parachute safety harnesses were used almost as decorations inside and outside jackets, offering a sort of post-modernist grid to frame and outline the tailored garments or cage the models' feet into men's gladiator sandals.

Tomato red suits matched with acid yellow shoes, light lime blazers and electric blue shirts and jackets gave a strong energy to the entire collection, that, though modern and urban, proved that Matsumura has some genuine talent when it comes to tailoring skills as also perfect light coats, denim jackets and long shirts fractured by long horizontal cuts showed.

A final honourable mention goes to the necklaces that seemed to be made with oversized 3-D Tetris-like pieces and that added an unusual and extravagant touch to classic blazers and cardigans.