With the notable exceptions of Dsquared and Armani, labels whose designers are unabashed in their appetite for manly types, a lot of shows this week cast models that looked as goofy as Rellie did and also far too young. This is probably as good a place as any to remark that, by returning to the clean tailoring, body-hugging lines and gimmick-free forms of his early career, Giorgio Armani produced his best show in a long time, one that had nothing to do with our general cultural infantilism, or what sometimes seems like a plot by the fashion cabal to get the Centrum Silver set to relinquish all hopes of growing old stylishly and to accept the inevitable orthotic inserts and elastic waists.
Easily the most aesthetically charged shows of the week were at Prada and Jil Sander, both labels by designers of intellectual agility, technical know-how and aesthetic quirkiness. Raf Simons at Sander recently narrowed his already-slim silhouette to the point where his models look like calligraphic brush strokes.
His palette this season was cool and maritime: the pale greens of dunes covered in beach grass, the flat blank blue of a Low Country sky. Somehow, though, while declining to flout the visual vocabulary created by the label's founding designer - often mischaracterized as minimalism - Simons has managed to articulate a visual idiom of his own. It is terse, direct and, as probably befits the son of a professional soldier, disciplined.
No sentimentalist, Miuccia Prada nevertheless remains a romantic, her work driven by her highly singular notion of social engagement in all kinds of media (art, architecture, music, clothes). It may seem like a far-fetched assertion to make about a designer who turns out a collection built around boiler suits, mad scientist lab coats, pajama sets in muted floral patterns, and skinny shirts over skinnier trousers in patterns that collide nearsighted geeks, but Prada has once again come up with her own alternative to the scrawny, unconvincing bad boys that have dominated men's fashion since Hedi Slimane first saw Pete Doherty play. It is not exactly that she makes emo fashion. But that's the general idea.
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