Marco Falcioni came up with the idea for his latest Boss collection on the way home from the spring ’23 show in Miami, courtesy of in-flight entertainment. As he sat back along the way, he watched being John Malkovich and was entranced by the highly stylized and oppressively macabre cinematographic vision of office life in Spike Jonze’s classic on the eve of the millennium. And then the thought occurred to him: “Oh God: everyone in this movie could have been dressed by Boss. Because that was a moment when Boss was really meant to be an office uniform.”
Once Falcioni arrived in Europe, his imagination took off as he started shaping the collection we saw (very, very, very) late this evening. It was what he called “corpcore,” an almost anthropological and sometimes surreal excavation of the tradition of “executive dress” at a social moment when Lazy Girl Jobs were trending and Working girl feels like a historical document. The memory of styling the very first Hugo Boss women’s clothing show, spring 2001 in Milan, with models like Gisele Bündchen, styled with paper clips in their chignons, gave him even more material to play with.
While consciously playing with a challenging palette of brown commercial carpet and off-white shades for PC cases, Falcioni created a collection with some excellent pieces. Two women’s dresses in the form of a jacket with shoulder pads, with reverse lapels and without closures were a clever Jonze-ian version of the eternal classic. Much of the tailoring featured a zipper instead of a seam at the spine, to create the feeling of shedding a second, artificial skin. Ironic touches included pens clipped into chignons and ties, and old-fashioned electric briefcases with apparently out-of-place combination locks (the code to open them was BOSS).
The show’s sartorial archeology was offset by a staged conceit called “techtopia,” which had us sitting in a sprawling, almost Tiffany-blue imaginary office space of the future, with an AI robot named Sophie and plenty of Philip K. Dick-adjacent breakout- spaces in the workspace. Unlike the still-scarring Brooks Brothers 200th anniversary show in Florence, Falcioni’s subversive recasting of the wardrobe on which Boss was built was deliberate and intelligent, reflecting how what was once a uniform for older patrons, has become a form of costume for their children.
