The models were dancing. Again.
Here, during the first full weekend of the men’s fall shows, a striking number of fashion houses had decided that just showing off their new clothes wasn’t enough. No, no, the audience has to have one performance straight from Alvin Ailey. The catwalk shows are over. There are free jazz dance recitals inside.
On Saturday in Brioni, designer Norbert Stumpfl interrupted a stroll through his collection of one-percent signifiers (crocodile skin jackets, vicuña coats, cashmere sweaters with devil-may-care-style loops over coats) to give me a chance to explore the gyrational style of a dancer. For a few minutes, a man wobbled and flopped across a red carpet. He waved his coat around like a matador with a cape, as if to say, “Look, Mom! No lining!”
Hours later, during a presentation at Corneliani, more dancers ran along a rotating platform, doing a pseudo-break dance in marbled gray sweaters and slate suits. They paused between slides to hug it out.
“I think male dancers are very emotional,” says Stefano Gaudioso Tramonte, the label’s style director.
The performance, choreographed by Kate Coyne, artistic director of London’s Central School of Ballet, not only provided some Instagrammable drama, but also indicated that the label’s pressed trousers and flat suits were not as restrictive as they seemed.
“All the substances are very strict,” said Mr. Guadioso Tramonte, “but we wanted to show that they are also quite fluid.”
The fledgling label Mordecai didn’t need a dance routine to show off the fluidity of its clothes – that was quite evident from the sloppy way the Abominable Snowman parkas and sagging striped trousers hung off the models during the presentation on Saturday afternoon. Yet Ludovico Bruno, the label’s founder and designer, made the static models come to life, bending and stomping like monks listening to Kraftwerk.
“It’s not a dance class, it’s more like a wave,” Mr. Bruno said.
Movement has long been a part of fashion presentations. In the 1990s, models walked the catwalk and survived with gusto. (Watch “Unzipped,” the powerful fashion documentary about Isaac Mizrahi, for some footage of that.) To this day, brands like Issey Miyake use dance troupes to whirl down the runway, emphasizing the fluidity of their clothes.
That dancing has become such a common motif in Milan speaks to the nature of the brands operating here. Many are traditionalists whose collections hardly vary from season to season. To unfriendly eyes, dance routines distract the audience from this fact. A friendlier view, of course, would be that the routines show the elegance and grace of the clothes.
And then of course there’s social media: every performance I witnessed this weekend was captured by the audience with iPhone in hand. I was able to view them all later on Instagram. How’s that for smart free marketing?
Labels like Mordecai represent the other, albeit relatively small, faction in Milan: younger companies that may not yet be confident enough for the catwalk, but haven’t resigned themselves to the static ‘oh, whatever’ feeling of a showroom, that to the uninitiated, looks like a well stocked store.
They should make that leap to the catwalk, instead of halving it with some choreography. After all, their Fashion Week audience is better suited to judge a top coat than a two-step.
