Valentine’s Day may be just around the corner, but the Fall ’16 menswear collections find designers embracing a kind of coeur that’s a long way from chalky conversation hearts. Rather than wearing your heart on your sleeve, this season some of the industry’s top names proposed the chest instead. Consider Dolce Gabbana’s sumptuous flaming heart (in line with the pair’s perennially Catholic-tinged aesthetic vocab); Massimiliano Giornetti’s cheeky intarsia for Salvatore Ferragamo; or (this writer’s personal favorite) the kitsch, Westernwear-esque pierced hearts Alessandro Michele sent out at Gucci.
For all the newness of Michele’s vision, these styles called to mind one by a brand largely lost in the annals of fashion history: Los Angeles designer Suse’s (née Susan Dannenberg) “novelty” sweaters of the 1940s, then-pricey knits that earned her plenty of press and celebrity clients, including Barbara Stanwyck and Esther Williams. Most famous of the Suse styles was the Jezebel, whose bejeweled felt heart-and-dagger design itself surely owes plenty to the Surrealist wit of Elsa Schiaparelli. Earlier still? An arrow-pricked heart sported by Ginger Rogers in 1938’s Carefree opposite Fred Astaire and dreamed up by Hollywood costume maestro Edward Stevenson.
