Milan Men’s Fashion Week: real men only for Dolce & Gabbana as Burberry pushes socks and sandals
As Milan Men’s Fashion Week kicked off, Dolce & Gabbana swopped male models for real men on the catwalk, while Burberry shocked with sandals and socks.
BY Luke Leitch | 23 June 2012
They sported iffy complexions, €10 haircuts, dodgy postures – and some of them were barely 5ft tall: high fashion has never seen models quite like these.
Yet the Italian designers Dolce & Gabbana’s decision to use real men, warts and all, instead of the usual skinny, sallow 19-year olds worked wonderfully at the first day of Milan Mens Fashion Week yesterday.
The cast of all-Sicilian males, aged 11 years and up, slouched or stomped up the catwalk in roughly woven patterned polo shirts, fisherman’s jumpers, baggy suits, cut-away shoes and high-ishly waisted trousers and shorts.
The unusual intrusion of real life into fashion’s compulsively unreal world meant it became immediately much easier to imagine many of the clothes being worn by the man on the Palermo omnibus.
Later, Britain’s most successful fashion brand boldly pitched much of its next-summer collection upon Britain’s most ridiculed men’s look: socks and sandals. But if anybody can make socks and sandals fashionable, it is Burberry’s Midas-touched designer-in-chief, Christopher Bailey.
These particular sandals came in virulent, Quality Street metallic shades that were nattily co-ordinated with the models’ sunglasses, bags, bomber jackets and macs.
Although it was those metallic flashes that caught the eye, the understated slimly fitted suiting was dapperly elegant. And the sunglasses will doubtless sell and sell – boosting Burberry’s share price still further into the FTSE’s stratosphere.
