Irenebrination: Notes on Architecture, Art, Fashion, Fashion Law, Science & Technology

Rainbow Geometries From Colourful Interiors: Christopher John Rogers Resort 22

Usually trends for the seasons ahead are launched during runway shows and presentations. As Coronavirus reshaped the fashion industry prompting many to cancel shows in favour of digital events (even though at the moment quite a few houses have opted for live catwalks with a reduced audience), many of us started looking at other places for tips about future trends.

Politics and inter-governmental political forums (think about the G7) can nowadays be considered as platforms to spot what may become fashionable in a few months' time: for example, there were quite a few interesting fashion moments in January 2021 during Inauguration Day.

In that occasion, US Vice President Kamala Harris opted for a purple (a colour associated with unity) ensemble by African-American designer Christopher John Rogers and she was already on trend as the designer is currently one of the finalists of the LVMH Prize, which will be announced in September 2021 at the Louis Vuitton Foundation in Paris.

The recipient of the CFDA/Vogue Fashion Fund's Emerging Designer Award in 2020, Christopher John Rogers seems to have moved on from dramatically tiered gowns to create coherent collections based on an in-depth research in textiles and colours.

His S/S 21 collection was an optimistic collection full of childish glee, the result of a combination of his experiments with colours and drawings during last year's lockdown, a palette maybe borrowed from Sesame Street, comprising Ernie and Bert's stripes and a Cookie Monster Blue, the artwork of Catholic Pop Art nun, Sister Corita Kent, and some hints at Stephen Burrows' (see the circles and strips knit dresses from that collection). 

For his Resort 2022 collection Rogers continued his journey through colours: his lookbook opens with apple green designs like a desirable reversible cocooning coat with one side covered in dots, breaks into multi-coloured looks with optical patterns and continues with black dresses that open up with geometrical inserts revealing rainbow shades and ensembles reminiscent of Pierrots' costumes again detailed with rainbow piping.

The bold rainbow knitwear offer was particular consistent and included an oversized rainbow chevron merino wool sweater, a godet ribbed knit polo dress in merino wool and a knit T-Shirt dress in 16gg merino wool. These designs seemed to have links with the colourful interior designs of Gerard Grandval.

The architect had a passion for subverting things: he would move from a shell to design prefabricated lodges characterised by sinuous waving shapes or inspired by a yacht's cabin, located in the snowy slopes above the French resort of La Plagne, and was a master in the use of colours.

His house featured stacked colourful soft rainbows, while his youth center Maison de Jeunes in Franconville near Paris (1967-1972) was a novelty, characterised by a colourful facade and built by children assembling its 100 components after school for a week.

These colourful architectures and interior designs are as euphoric and fun as Rogers' knitted striped dresses or optimistic little black dresses with subtle rainbow pleats or technicolor sequin-covered evening gowns.

Rogers has also got a passion for fashion anachronisms: in this lookbook he matched structured bustiers reminiscent of fully boned corsets from the 1700s with striped palazzo pants in silk faille that looked borrowed from the late '60s (besides, quite often the style of his lookbooks is reminiscent of Vogue's photoshoots from the '70s).

The vibrant sense of joy was also clear in the patterns and prints for this collection: previously, Rogers worked with deadstock materials, but for this collection he has turned to producers of sumptuous silk fabrics such as Italian Ratti, manufacturer of luxurious and sustainable textiles since 1945.

The metallic jacquard employed for the exaggerated strawberry skirt - one of Rogers' most successful silhouettes that, borrowed from Haute Couture, has become his signature - was for example woven by Ratti. The same print was adapted for casual suits and a batwing sleeve dropped waist evening gown. 

Rogers seems to have started learning how to reduce the voluminous proportions of his previous collections to make his garments more werable, even though he still added an oversized colorblock silk faille version of Balenciaga's iconic babydoll dress in this collection.

While Rogers' shouldn't stop experimenting with voluminous ball gowns, he will have to move on from these Balenciaga references as he doesn't need them, he is indeed more at ease when he turns to interior design and architecture to find his own language and develop his identity.

Jipke Lezwijn, Origami Knits for Physical & Mental Well-Being

The last time we looked at the work of Jipke Lezwijn, she had radically transformed the flag of The Netherlands, re-weaving it for Dutch artist Sanne Vaassen.

The artist and weaver has got news for us: she recently completed her MA at London's Royal College of Art. Her new works are inspired by origamis: Lezwijn seems to have pleated and folded her knitted surfaces to create innovative and colourful pieces.

Her "Origamy" collection includes a selection of knitted origami objects made with sustainable materials and innovative knitting techniques.

The results look visually pleasing, geometrically intriguing and fascinatingly complex, as if the bold geometrical knits in bright colours by the late English designer Kay Cosserat (Lezwijn is a recipient of a Kay Cosserat Bursary) had taken new and more exciting three-dimensional configurations (View this photo).  

On Lezwijn's Instagram page you can get a view of some of the pieces, most of them woven in a variety of colours, forming three-dimensional triangles, hexagons and other structures than can be turned inside out and mutate their patternb at each turn.    

But Lezwijn didn't stop at the mere surface of things: the material engineer with a passion for observing the world and for socially engaging people, hopes with her practice to benefit others, contribute to a brighter future and bring joy and positivity, so she developed the collection also as a way to provide comfort and infinite tactile joy.

The Coronavirus pandemic has socially distanced us, reminding us to avoid frequently touched surfaces and wash our hands often and thoroughly. Lezwijn's pieces are conceived as sustainable fidgeting tools that replace the usual fidgeting plastic toys. The pieces invite people to touch and play with them. This simple exercise centred around joy and positivity, is supposed to be a sensorial journey, and aims at relieving stress while fidgeting with these objects and at improving our physical and mental health, reconnecting also with other people. 

The simple gesture of folding and unfolding the textiles contributes to tune fine motor skills, helps us retaining fading memories, and encourages us to recover our happiness.

Do you like the idea of woven materials inspired by paper structures or are you intrigued by designs made by combining textiles and paper? Research them further. Check out for example these Hanji Paper bags in white or black (dyed with charcoal).

These shopper bags are made of cotton and 'Hanji' (traditional Korean handmade paper made from the inner bark of Broussonetia papyrifera, colloquially known as paper mulberry) by one of the leading Hanji artisans, Park Sung-man.

The bags are available for sale on the Tatami Antiques site, an independent online marketplace for Japanese antiquities that often offers intriguing textile pieces and ideas for fashion designers, including patterns, kimonos and mini-kimonos for dolls (the bags are sold by antique seller kikue, specialising in Korean pieces).

Biomimicry Inspiration: Neverita Josephinia, The Ruffle Making Snail

In yesterday’s post we looked at The Tower, a new building in Arles, part of the Parc des Ateliers. While we mainly looked at the outside of the building, the inside is also intriguing: a picture shows indeed a spiral and spirals are incredibly exciting structures as we have seen in previous posts.

There is actually nothing more exciting than spirals found in nature in particular in shells, but there are spiral snails that are also capable of building equally striking structures.

Have you ever seen on a beach in summer around June (roughly) 6cm x 3cm ruffle-like strips that look as if they were made of a rubbery sand material?

If you did, but never picked them up being afraid they were parts of some kind of toxic material abandoned on the beach, well, you shouldn't have been afraid at all. In fact these strips aren't toxic at all but they are fragile collar-shaped egg-masses produced by the Neverita Josephinia, also known as Josephine's Moon Snail for its smooth shell (or Moon Shell, Moon Snail, Necklace Shell, Naticid Snail or Neverita Josephine). 

The egg casings of this predatory snail are indeed as intriguing as the texture of Murex seashell egg casings: basically during the breeding season, the female moon snail lays an egg mass mixed with sand and with the snail's own mucus (this material is a sort of mucous concrete, characterised by a rubbery consistency, but sandy to the touch and a bit slippery as well). 

The result is a spiral semi-circle with a ruffled edge, also known as "sand collar" as the shape of the egg casings look like old-fashioned collars of the type you may see in paintings.

If you put the ribbon against the sun you will see thousands of tiny cells filled with tiny protoconches (essentially micro shells) forming a pattern similar to that of lace.  

Despite producing such a fragile egg structure with the precision of an artisan and having such a poetical name, the Neverita Josephinia is a predatory snail, capable of some, er, shell atrocities.

These snails attack indeed other molluscs, digging a hole through the shell with the radula and then consuming the flesh of their prey.

And while you may be sorry for the prey, if you find several empty shells with Neverita Josephinia's perfect holes, you will be able to do some great necklaces, bracelets and earrings with them and the Moon Shell will have done half the job for you (you will just have to thread a string through the shells.

To see the ruffle-shaped ribbons of eggs underwater, just peel your eyes and try to spot the circular frilly structures from the surface (see last picture in this post). Don't pick them to avoid disturbing the eggs (in my case my brother found some casings on the beach during a walk), but have a look on the beach and try and find older and dried up egg casings. Put them in the water to allow them to get back their original elasticity and smoothness and observe them a bit better, enjoying a completely free creative class in biomimicry inspired by spirals and ruffles found in nature.

Sustainable Architecture With a Shiny Twist: The Tower by Frank Gehry @ LUMA, Arles, France

The Tower, a landmark structure designed by architect Frank Gehry, located in the heart of the Parc des Ateliers in Arles, France, has finally opened.  

Built between 2014 and 2021, the 56 meters tall Tower is a 15,000-square-meter building, incorporating a series of structures and spaces, including exhibition halls, archive spaces, a library, work and research rooms, event venues, a café-restaurant and a panoramic terrace on the 9th floor. 

From the outside it looks particularly fascinating: its façade incorporates indeed 11,000 stainless steel bricks, a material typical of Gehry's work. Each brick is unique and with a special number and location on the building. Deformed with a specific mechanical process the bricks contribute to give the illusion the Tower is twisted on itself. The twisted façade effect calls to mind structures such as the Spiral Apartment House by Zvi Hecker (located on a hillside in Ramat Gan, Israel).

Besides, The Tower also incorporates 53 glass boxes that visitors can use as windows extending beyond the façade to offer different views of the site and its surroundings. 

Thanks to its reflective surface, a nod to the pictorial practice of Vincent van Gogh and to his passion for Provençal skies, The Tower perfectly captures the variations in the sky, replicating them and therefore giving the illusion of being in constant transformation. 

While it looks like one tower it is actually made of four different interconnected towers, attached to a concrete spine that houses the elevators and stairs. The structure is also inspired by minerals. 

Gehry was indeed inspired by the rock clusters of the region for the shape and the internal structure of the building, and in particular by the landscapes of the Alpilles (even though the irregular and reflective shade actually seems to point to rainbow bismuth crystals, so to a different configuration) and the architect also used the geological vocabulary to characterise certain parts of the building, such as the glazed "faults" (indicating in geology planar fractures or discontinuities in a volume of rock caused by a significant displacement as a result of rock-mass movements) that run along the façade and connect the towers together.

The structure at the foot of the building, the Drum, is a glass rotunda inspired by the Arles Amphitheater, and it is inspired instead by Roman structures and urbanism. 

The Tower is also sustainable as the energy supply for this structure and for other buildings on the site will be provided by the centralized cogeneration system using waste vegetable oil installed in Les Forges.

The Tower, opening with an exhibition including works by Diane Arbus, Annie Leibovitz, Olafur Eliasson and others, is part of the Parc des Ateliers, an area covering 27 hectares originally built in the 19th century as an industrial site for the repair and construction of steam locomotives.

At its height it was also the city's largest employer with more than 1,800 workers on site. With the arrival of electric locomotives, the Parc was gradually dismissed until it closed in 1984, becoming an industrial wasteland. From 2000 onwards, the site underwent a gradual renaissance until it was relaunched as a cultural hub with the LUMA  Arles project, an arts centre launched in 2013 by Swiss collector Maja Hoffmann.

Among the creative spaces based at the Parc there is also the Atelier LUMA, a design and research laboratory, a production workshop, and a network of multidisciplinary experts comprising 20 people, among them designers, artists, biologists, engineers and farmers. The atelier has been focusing on different projects including the reuse of agricultural wastes and valorization of traditional crafts.   

Several innovative and sustainable materials developed by Atelier LUMA were also employed in the Tower, among them salt walls and salt and concrete ceilings, developed in collaboration with the salt workers of the Salins du Midi, the result of an exploration of the properties of salt in the context of a public building in the Camargue, and the potential benefits of new uses of salt on the local economy.

Besides, the tile-shaped wall coverings inside The Tower were made from algae biopolymers, which have been in development at Atelier LUMA since 2016.  

Upholstery fabrics for The Tower were also developed through Atelier LUMA's research on Arles merino wool, invasive species, and pigments from local dye plants and algae. Artist Rirkrit Tiravanija created acoustic panels in sunflower pith and hung a monumental tapestry in The Tower café. Last but not least, the furniture in The Tower is the result of a collaboration between Atelier LUMA, local farmers, and publisher Artek, who applied research conducted since 2017 on rice straw and invasive species to the manufacture of objects. 

Image Credits for this post

1. The Tower, LUMa, Arles, France

2. Drawing of The Tower by Frank Gehry

3. The Tower in construction, September 2016, by Hervé Hôte

4, 5 and 6. The Tower, LUMA, Arles, France by Adrian Deweerdt

7. The Tower, LUMA, Arles, France, by Marc Domage

8. The Tower, LUMA, Arles, France, by Rémi Benali

Weekend Inspiration: Expandable & Incremental Housing

This has been a very Thayaht week, so let’s close it today with an architectural project by the Italian painter, sculptor, illustrator and fashion designer in collaboration with his brother RAM.

In the early '30s Ernesto Michahelles (1893-1959) and Roger Alfred Michahelles (1898-1976) worked together on a modern architectural project for a basic, functional yet striking house. The "Brevetto per Casolaria (Casa Razionale Estensibile)" [Patent for Casolaria (Rational Extensible House)] was presented to the Italian patent office on 15th December 1931.

The patent referred to a very basic and simple house that respected the minimalist and pure lines of rationalism, but was also characterised by spaces such as the balconies and flat roofs on which the household residents could relax and sunbathe (the name Casolaria is a sort of futurist pun, playing with the words "casa", "house", and "sole"/"solarium", "sun"/"solarium"). 

The basic structure of the house could be extended in accordance with the needs of the residents, so from its basic model it could become medium-sized when an extra floor was added or even larger. All the main features like the energy and heating systems would remain the same, but the spaces would change adding volumes on a programmed base. There was one element that proved the Michahelles brothers were projected into the future - the garage. When they designed the house there were fewer than 15,000 registered cars in Italy, yet they decided to include in the project a garage, predicting there would have been more vehicles on the roads in future. 

The Casolaria was never built, but modern projects somehow explored this concept and took it further: Alejandro Aravena's practice Elemental created different projects (that you can download here for free) that take into consideration the possibility of expanding and are based on the principle of incremental construction, such as low-income housing that are only half completed, while the other half can be developed by the residents when they need and can afford to do so.

The incremental principle could be reproduced also in fashion with a basic garment (or accessory) that could be gradually changed or modified by adding elements via zips, buttons and fastenings. While this is not a new concept, if you're a fashion designer you can try and take it further, making the expandable/incremental principle the starting point of your weekend project.

UFO Hype From the '50s: Thayaht, Italian Artist, Sculptor, Fashion Designer & Pioneering Ufologist

The Pentagon may release a highly anticipated declassified report on various unidentified aerial phenomena today. UFO enthusiasts and UFO sightings hotspots à la Roswell, New Mexico, where a flying saucer (or a weather balloon?) may have landed in July 1947, are obviously eager to hear about the contents, with some towns made famous by aliens and flying saucers hoping tourists will return to populate them as the Coronavirus pandemic eases.

Though hotly anticipated, the Pentagon report on the activities of the Advanced Aerospace Threat Identification Program (AATIP) may not reveal anything incredibly secret nor confirm the existence of extraterrestrial life. Still, excitement remains around the event, after all, who doesn't want to hear some kind of incredible news, maybe about faraway galaxies populated by friendly aliens maybe willing to share their advanced knowledge and technologies with us (let’s imagine them as friendly creatures as, after Coronavirus, we couldn't cope with an alien invasion). So, as we wait for the report let's go back in history to rediscover early ufologists with some links with art and fashion.

Italian painter, sculptor, illustrator and fashion designer Ernesto Michahelles (1893-1959), better known as Thayaht, had a passion for flying saucers. The inventor of the "tuta", T-shaped overalls with a belted waist, developed an interest in astronomy and UFOs in the '40s.

In 1954 he founded the C.I.R.N.O.S. (Centro Indipendente Notizie Osservazioni Spaziali – Independent Centre for the Recording of Space Information), a sort of scientific association set to study UFOs that was based in his summer house in Marina di Pietrasanta (near Lucca).

Thayaht had heard about UFO sightings in France (many sightings were recorded in the Autumn of 1954) where the engineer Aimé Michel had published the book "Lueurs sur les soucoupes volantes" (Glimmering lights on flying saucers) in 1954, followed by "Mystérieux Objets Célestes" (About Flying Saucers) in 1958.

Michel devised a theory called orthoténie, claiming that UFO sightings were concentrated along straight lines which corresponded to large circles traced and centered on the Earth. Michel's therefore claimed that the sightings occurred according to a clever and ordered pattern.

In Italy there were UFO sightings in the '50s, the most famous ones occurred in October 1954 over the Duomo and the Stadium in Florence. Thayaht, who had developed a passion for Futurism in his life, wrote a first report on UFO sightings in 1955, focusing mainly on 120 sightings that had occurred in 82 locations in Italy. He then published a second report, even more detailed than the first one, in 1958. By then sightings in Italy had multiplied as also chronicled by popular Italian weekly "La domenica del Corriere" that often dedicated to these events its imaginative illustrated covers.

Archival photos show Thayaht on the roof of his Casa Bianca (White House) in Marina di Pietrasanta with his friend Ettore Toto, next to the telescope he used for his observations. The artist had also prepared a registration form to facilitate people who witnessed UFO sightings with recording the event.

Thayaht had a passion for parapsicological analysis as well and believed in two aspects linked with UFO sightings, the "psi"  and the "sigma" effect. The former consisted in a telepathic connection between the UFO and the witness of the sighting that prompted the witness to look at the sky and spot the flying saucer. The Sigma effect consisted instead in interferences on the electrical circuits of cars and on compasses. After Thayaht died in 1959, but Alberto Perego continued his studies in Italy, writing books and reports about UFOs, but Thayaht remained the only artist with some great fashion connections to have ever studied UFOs in Italy and in the rest of the world.

 

When Giant Summer Strawberries in Fashion Make You Think about the Fruit Saga of Seasonal Migrant Workers

Strawberries have always been fashionable. A favourite Summer motif, you can often find them printed on all sorts of garments and accessories. I still remember the yellow shorts and skirt with their prints of large fuchsia strawberries I had in the early '80s as a young girl. Bought from an Italian department store - Upim - they were the main staple of my Summer wardrobe, almost a symbol of carefree happy days. Those long and happy strawberry summer days came to mind when I saw JW Anderson's S/S 22 menswear and resort collection. The collections feature indeed giant strawberries in natural colours or in surreal acid shades, replicated on tops, trousers, oversized bags and slide sandals. Bright and fun, youthful and cheerful, these designs lensed by Juergen Teller, do not hide anything conceptual about them. They are just strawberries for fun summer days. Strawberry fields forever. Or maybe not. Soft fruit is indeed at the centre of a fruity saga in the UK. After Brexit happened growers in Britain feared the flow of migrant seasonal workers going to the UK to pick soft fruit such as strawberries, may have been disrupted by new laws and regulations. 

Most of them usually come from Eastern Europe, in particular from countries such as Romania, Bulgaria, Russia, Ukraine and Belarus. When free movement of migrant farm labour from the EU came to an end, it was replaced by a pilot Seasonal Agricultural Workers Scheme that allows people to go to the UK for up to six months to do farm work.

The scheme started in 2019 with an annual quota of 2,500 workers; in 2020 it was extended to 10,000 workers, while the government launched the "Pick for Britain" campaign to find domestic workers. As the campaign was a flop (of the people placed on farms by one major agency, fewer than 4% remained on assignment by the end of the season) and it soon became clearer that it was unlikely to find domestic force, in 2021 a new extension made 30,000 visas available for people to work on UK farms. 

The amount of form-filling, post-Brexit immigration red tape and the Delta Coronavirus variant in the UK started posing serious issues for many seasonal workers who were discouraged, causing applications to fall dramatically (some farmers registered a 90% decrease in applications). 

But there are other reasons that also discouraged migrant workers: demanding targets set by employers and zero-hour contracts (workers are paid for the amount of fruit they pick rather than by the hour, so if you don’t meet the targets you can be dismissed); besides, under free movement, workers could change jobs freely, but those under the seasonal workers pilot can only change roles with the help of the same agencies that brought them over and are not allowed to seek work in other industries.

Focus on Labour Exploitation (FLEX), a research and policy NGO organisation working towards an end to labour exploitation, reported workers being pushed to do more work, being given inaccurate information about earnings before travelling to the UK, being refused to transfer to other farms and ending up not earning enough to cover living costs and the debts they incurred in before moving to the UK.

Horticulture is in a crisis also in other countries and migrant workers are a vital asset to countries such as Italy and Spain: yet quite often these workers are not protected by laws and they are exploited, and obliged to sleep and live in unhealthy environments. The Coronavirus pandemic shed light on racial, healthcare and income disparities, but Brexit in the case of the UK is contributing to reveal the conditions of migrant seasonal workers in the UK. So, yes, let strawberries be forever trending in fashion, but never forget the labor conditions in strawberry fields.

Healthier Post-Covid Fashion Trends: Partnerships & Vaccination Hubs

Fashion is rebooting with quite a few houses opting for live menswear shows at the moment, albeit with smaller and obviously safely distanced members of the audience. The Pitti trade shows, taking place at the end of June, are also rebooting with special safety regulations that include mask wearing and body temperature scanning, but also special medical facilities and even rapid testing hubs.

Yet there are signs that merely returning to the usual shows is not really the future of fashion and there seems to be very different trends and needs for fashion companies.

For example, it was recently announced that Ermenegildo Zegna and Prada bought a majority stake in Italian cashmere company Filati Biagioli Modesto SpA together. The Montale (near Pistoia)-based Biagioli Modesto, founded in 1919, is extremely well-known for its high quality cashmere, silk, camel, angora, alpaca, linen, lambswool and extra-fine merino yarns and for humble yet striking presentations at yarn trade fairs, but it is definitely not that usual to see two companies and fashion powerhouses investing together in a yarn company, even a luxury one.

The details of the deal remain undisclosed but Prada and Ermenegildo Zegna will each have a 40% stake in the company, while the Biagioli family will retain a 15% stake and the remaining 5% will be owned by Chief Executive Officer Renato Cotto (who has worked for other yarn and textile companies, including Zegna Baruffa, Cariaggi and Loro Piana). Besides, Gildo Zegna, CEO of his family's company, will take on the role of Chairman, while Franca Biagioli and Patrizio Bertelli, CEO of Prada, will join the Board of Directors.

It is obvious that, while Zegna and Prada may want to expand their knitwear offer in this way, this move is more about protecting the Italian supply chain, a decision maybe dictated by what happened during the Coronavirus pandemic in other fields.

Last year when Italy was in dire need of masks and PPE equipment and the country realised it was impossible to just import these products from China as usual, quite a few Italian companies reconverted their plants to produce them. In March 2020, after receiving a request from the Tuscany region, Prada made 110,000 sanitary masks and 80,000 medical overalls for health-care personnel in Montone (Perugia); nowadays most of the face masks that you find in shops and supermarkets in Italy are made by local companies.

With this acquisition Zegna and Prada aren't doing anything extremely revolutionary: a lack of semiconductors drove America to review the supply chains in some key industries such as semiconductor chips and invest domestically; by buying a majority stake in Biagioli Modesto, both the companies will have the possibility of expanding knitwear collections, but will also protect supply chains, think locally, and check quality closely and at every step of the process (it is worth mentioning here that with this agreement Biagioli Modesto will still be able to work for other companies and will not be limited to work only for Zegna and Prada).

Both the Zegna Group and Prada started a while back a process of acquisitions similar to Chanel's that, through its Paraffection subsidiary, has been buying throughout the years a variety of maisons producing key parts, yarns and accessories for its own collections. Apart from its Lanificio Zegna, the Zegna Group for example already owns Lanerie Agnona, Tessitura di Novara, Bonotto and Dondi, plus a a controlling stake in Pelle Tessuta, and a majority stake in men's hat brand Cappellificio Cervo, besides, it recently acquired 60% of Tessitura Ubertino.

Now, mergers and acquisition are not new in Italy, but these partnerships are maybe showing new directions and the will to collaborate further together to hopefully create a healthier industry and this may have been the result of a change in attitudes introduced by Coronavirus. After all there have been further signs of solidarity in these last few months: in April 2021, after a fire burnt down a Valentino manufacturing plant in Tuscany, Bertelli made one of Prada's nearby factories available to a number of Valentino's employees to make sure they could keep on working in rather difficult times for the fashion industry.

Besides, different fashion groups have so far contributed to the vaccination campaign. Gucci, Prada and Armani opened their headquarters  to vaccinate their employees; Renzo Rosso's OTB also contributed to set up a vaccination hub in Bassano Del Grappa for the local population; the OVS Group offered its spaces in Mestre, to vaccinate employees in the Veneto region, but also families of its employees and locals.

The Solomeo-based king of cashmere Brunello Cucinelli has been busy vaccinating his 1,174 employees against COVID-19 (for the time being Cucinelli has asked no vax employees to stay at home with a paid leave for six months, but ideally he would like everybody to be vaccinated).

The vaccination hub he established in the Solomeo-headquarters through his fashion company and the Brunello and Federica Cucinelli Foundation, is also open to locals (it was also visited by general Francesco Paolo Figliuolo, Extraordinary Commissioner for the Implementation of Health Measures to Contain the COVID-19 pandemic) and Cucinelli pays for the salaries of the 16 individuals in charge of administering the vaccinations. In a nutshell, maybe gone are the days when fashion was just about hanging around the front row with impossibly hip people, who knows, we may be making way for another and healthier (rather than merely trendier...) fashion scene.

That Video-Call Look That Doesn't Want to Disappear

In the 1956 film "Totò, Peppino e i fuorilegge" (Totò, Peppino and the outlaws) directed by Camillo Mastrocinque, Italian comedian and actor Totò plays the role of a man married to a rich lady, Teresa (the indomitable Titina De Filippo), who happens to be a bit of a cheapskate.

One day he asks for a fresh shirts and she gives him a bib-like shirt and a pair of cuffs. When he complains she explains that it's unnecessary to have a whole shirt made, after all, most of the shirt gets covered by the jacket. In this way only the parts that can be seen are actually made, saving money and fabric.

Luckily, our wardrobes aren't dictatorially regulated by anybody as stingy as Teresa in this film, but Coronavirus has changed our habits.

All the Zoom meetings, classes and events we had in the last past months prompted us to focus our attention on the parts of our outfits that were visible on the computer, smartphone and tablet screens, so we often opted to wear a nice top, while we neglected the bottom half.   

As we gradually go back to normality, it is only natural to wonder why a few fashion houses opted to include in their menswear collections for the next season designs that may still be described as Zoom looks styled by Teresa out of "Totò, Peppino e i fuorilegge". 

Prada included in its S/S 22 menswear collection three rib-knit cardigan bibs: yet, rather than be donned like sweaters underneath a jacket (Totò style...), these designs are supposed to be worn on top of jackets as if they were scarves.

Fendi went further creating for the same season cropped double-breasted boxy jackets with short sleeves dangerously reminiscent of Sacha Baron Cohen’s Brüno's half suit seen in the 2009 eponymous film about the reckless fashion obsessed Austrian reporter (View this photo). While the designs didn't look that bad when layered on other garments, by themselves they seemed to spoil the serene mood of the collection with its pleasant pastels, going from lemon yellow to lilac and arty abstract prints, and featuring a series of versatile accessories including bucket hat-shaped bags and mini Baguette bags in Plexiglas.

The supposedly fun cropped jackets were maybe meant to add a touch of youthful frivolity to the collection, but the more you looked at them, the more you thought about nightmarish Zoom meetings in the time of Coronavirus combined with that hilarious moment Teresa gives Totò his brand new yet incomplete shirt in "Totò, Peppino e i fuorilegge".

Boyhood at the End of the Tunnel to Joy: Prada Men's S/S 22

While some fashion houses in Milan opted for real-life shows, others are still presenting their new collections via lookbooks and films, continuing to toe to the Coronavirus regulations that we have followed for more than a year now.

Prada is among the latter and showed its S/S 22 menswear collection with a film (that some journalists and critics actually watched live at the Fondazione Prada in Milan, an event followed by a preview of the actual clothes that you can explore in a 360° digital format here).

There was a sense of doom followed by hope in the film: models walked along a claustrophobic red tunnel (installed in a warehouse at the Fondazione Prada in Milan), but they emerged on a rocky and beautiful beach in Sardinia (where Prada supports the MEDSEA Foundation in its project to restore marine ecosystems with the reforestation of Posidonia oceanica meadows in the Marine Protected Area of Capo Carbonara).

Here some of the models walked along the beach, others danced or sat on red platforms floating on the sea or immersed themselves in crystalline waters. 

The metaphor wasn't hard to understand: because of the pandemic we have all been navigating through a terrible year, but there is light at the end of the tunnel as proved by this simple transition from the inside to the outside, we all feel a need for the simple joys of everyday life, for reconnecting with the natural elements that we have missed.

Maybe there was also a need for Prada to do something the house had never done before, that is letting its models roam in an open space, abandoning the highly conceptual spaces created season after season for its runways, and in doing so abandoning more technological inspirations to reconnect with the essence of human life.

Clothes and accessories also pointed at the possibility of wandering in open spaces: we may have abandoned the tracksuits that marked the long lockdown months, but we are not in the mood to wear any proper suits yet, so Miuccia Prada and co-designer Raf Simons are suggesting us another option - the short jumpsuit with turned-up short hems, or to be more precise the short version of the tuta (overalls) by Italian painter and sculptor Ernesto Michahelles, better known as Thayaht. Prada has actually been a consistent Thayaht fan throughout the seasons.

The geometrical patterns of the skorts (a combination of shorts and skirt) also pointed at the patterns of Thayaht's "ancali" (hip-shorts) and the tank-tops evoked his "toraco" (a thorax vest). The squared necklines of the tanks matched with relaxed pants, also had a late 1920s mood, in the same way as the squarish shapes of the sandals in this collection pointed at designs created by Thayaht for the Summer of 1929.

Bizarrelly, also the shapes of the bucket hats with an elongated brim at the back with a triangular logo pocket or with slits in the front to allocate sunglasses, seemed to echo the shapes of the hats for Thayaht's 1928 straw hat campaign. 

The collection also bore elements of previous Prada collections such as the nautical tattoo-like prints of octopuses, sea monsters, anchors and sirens, reminiscent of Prada's A/W 2016 with further nautical moods injected in a boat-neck sweater with crisscross detail and in an updated version of a classic yellow fisherman's raincoat (evoked also by a yolk-yellow biker jacket) with a matching hat.

Some of the other prints may have come from a Prada collection from around 1996, while the emphasis on shorts was more recent (see the S/S 19 collection) and the thick terry hoodies and bucket bags in cracked leather evoked vintage moods lost between the end of the '60s and the early '70s.

So, in a way that re-emergence into the open air was also a return to the past, almost a quest for a lost innocence on the beach that at times trapped Prada's models in a suspended grey area between boyhood and manhood.

Some elements in the looks of the models showed indeed a desire to be back in the office, possibly in powerful positions, but the rompers matched with derby shoes sprouting surreal sea anemones seemed to pigeonhole the models into childhood.

Apart from being trapped into this suspended world, the models also looked a bit lifeless despite the key sentences accompanying the collection - "tunnel to joy", "urgency of feelings" and "utopia of normality" - pointed at a rebirth of happiness. You wish that at least one model had left behind the classic conceptual miserabilism that belongs to the runway and smiled to express that sense of ebullient joy at being on a beautiful beach in a post-pandemic world.

Sadly, that didn't happen and, unfortunately, there was no recorded chat between co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons (the norm for the last few seasons) that may have shed some light on Simons' role, as at the moment he seems to have been in awe of the Prada archive and too busy pillaging it. Yet the beach and the crystalline waters of Capo Carbonara looked paradisiacal, that's undeniable, can we have more of that and forget fashion?