Pirate, Buffalo Girls, Savages, Punkature: Right from the start, Vivienne Westwood’s collections plundered freely from the past and mixed womenswear with men’s to create a fashion free zone where the rules of convention were gleefully disregarded. That punk impulse to disrupt still remains at the core of the house’s heritage following her passing nearly three years ago.
This morning Westwood’s widower and house copilot for over three decades, Andreas Kronthaler, reestablished the brand’s presence on the Milan menswear schedule for the first time since June 2016. More dynamic mise-en-scène than show, it saw an overwhelmingly male cast take their passeggiata through a San Babila café and then out into a streetside marble-floor arcade.
While the collection we were here to see was menswear, including beautifully loose and louche tailoring, there was an interjection of pieces plundered from across the house’s current womenswear collections. “I can’t avoid it,” said Kronthaler. “I don’t think there should be strict separations of anything. I don’t think it ever works. And there is always in a man a little bit of woman—sometimes quite a lot.”
Quite-a-lot looks included the faux-fur leopard coat and python-print court shoes and handbag—racy Milan nonna meets Gentlemen Prefer Blondes. A statuesquely draped floral photo-print dress was teamed with Roman sandals and a cursive metal necklace that spelled out a curse word. There was a strong rose-embroidered tabard with a mid-calf red satin boot. A rugby shirt was extended to ankle length; a stretch-knit patterned bodysuit with a navel-gazing aperture was equal-opportunitiy provocative.
The tailoring took a satirical approach to peacock dressing, hiking pants as high as they would rise and peaking lapels to the apex of shoulder lines. Shirting and dress pants in crisp cotton were cut to undulate and enhanced with fulsome pocketing. A red T-shirt printed with a portrait of Garibaldi—whose Redshirts drove the uprising that unified Italy—cutely unified a masculine shawl-collar tailored menswear jacket and some feminine skirt-front shorts in oversized gold pinstripe.
Humorous and anti-consumerist, this return to Milan prefigured a more conventional runway approach next January. When it was put to Kronthaler that the house is now a heritage brand whose source code is subversion, he said: “There are so many things here, really, like no other brand. Because of [Westwood’s] long work and going through so many facets and changes, there are four or five different periods that belong to this house somehow. But at the same time, we are not nostalgic.” As he spoke, the bells of San Babila church across the road sounded notice of midday.
Whatever Kronthaler’s suspicion of nostalgia, it was a thrill to see the same platforms that so famously upended Naomi Campbell on the runway make fall-free cameos in two looks toward the end of this show. Vivienne Westwood was close to inarguably the most influential designer of her time; her name should continue to resound as loudly as San Babila’s bells.
