Comics can be great sources of inspiration for fashion designers: at times their layout contributes to give a garment a sort of Pop Art twist; at others a specific character sets the mood for a collection.
Bruno Sialelli at Lanvin moved from Corto Maltese for the A/W 20 menswear collection, showcased in Paris in the building of the National Dance Center.
Created in the late '60s by Italian artist Hugo Pratt (Ugo Eugenio Prat), Corto Maltese is a sailor (the theme of the sea was also behind Lanvin's S/S 20 collection, as you may remember) and adventurer, a free spirit who travels the world, searching for lost continents, believing in heroism, witsnessing key historical events and meeting cultural icons and world leaders. While the drawings are at times stiff, with characters often depicted in half profile, the stories have engaging plots and they are rich with details.
A drifter with no allegiances but with a penchant for helping the disadvantaged, Corto Maltese is usually dressed in a navy uniform of no particular nationality that he wears with an upturned collar (somehow the character may become the icon of style par excellence come next season as there was a sort of Corto Maltese lookalike also in the opening of Yohji Yamamoto's menswear runway).
On Lanvin's runway there were long navy officer's coats, pea coats and jackets with large silver buttons or metal clasps. Sections taken from Pratt's "Sirat Al Bunduqiyyah (Favola di Venezia)" (Sialelli, a comics fan, obtained permission to use all the illustrations in the collection) were printed on elegant fringed silk scarves, shirts and sporty jackets.
Corto Maltese's profile surrounded by seagulls was also reinterpreted as an intarsia motif on knitwear, while a famous watercolour sketch showing Corto Maltese with a cat was replicated on a jacket.
The watercolour effect worked particularly well on a trench coat with details of birds flying in the blue sky (that went well with the title of the collection - "Beach Birds" after a 1993 choreography by Merce Cunningham); further romantic touches were added to the collection via bows in Charles Rennie Mackintosh style that also featured Pratt's illustrations.
Striped beanie hats made with feathers and multicoloured feather necklaces reminiscent of Hawaiian leis (were they a way to homage Haute Couture houses à la Maison Lemarié that are specialised in these techniques?) represented exotic elements that called to mind Corto Maltese's adventures in faraway countries.
The collection also featured a juxtaposition of vintage and urban: all the bags featured Lanvin's original logo showing Jeanne Lanvin with her daughter, while most of the models wore chunky skate shoes with thick multicoloured laces in zigzag patterns.
There was also a further contrast between the men's looks that seemed poetically romantic, but also adventurous and playful, and the looks from the Pre-Fall collection that featured elegantly refined but uninteresting designs as if women weren't allowed to join Corto Maltese's wild adventures, but they could just be his companions.
Yet there was a bit of a faux pas here: while Sialelli maybe wanted to channel in this collection the original Corto Maltese, a drifter who walks and roams the world, the playful and maybe naive component that derived from his time at Loewe reshifted the collection towards a lighter mood that reeked more of Tin Tin than of Pratt's anti-hero. In future Sialelli will have to leave behind his past if he wants to give a genuinely new identity to Lanvin.
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