Crying Diamonds
Geometric Discharge
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MILAN, January 16, 2011
By Tim Blanks
One curious subtext in Milan this season has been the name-checking of Wall Street-style corporate sharks as style inspirations, but Consuelo Castiglioni looked to their exact opposite: the salt-of-the-earth blue-collar joes. These were clothes at their most utilitarian, cut from heavy, dry, hard-wearing fabrics like gab, felt, fleece, and a cotton/nylon blend. It was a good season for Marni to launch a denim line. The fabric was originally created for just such a worker's jacket and generously cut jeans.
br/> Solid shoes looked fit for the factory floor. Even a dressier piece like the double-breasted coat in gray felt had a rough-and-ready, no-nonsense feel. Same with an unstructured suit in khaki cotton. But that isn't to say that there wasn't a fashion sensibility at work. What looked like a jacket and pants, also in khaki cotton, was in fact a boiler suit. Plain dark navy shirts were sweetened up with tone-on-tone prints: flowers, hearts, polka dots. A multi-pocketed jacket in washed leather was given extra movement with wool ribbing. And there was a sizzling jolt of red—which is rapidly emerging as the season's favorite accent—in a mohair crewneck.
It was surely the directness of the inspiration that made this one of the strongest Marni men's outings in a while, and the collection was scarcely all work and no play. There were astrakhan hats and scarves, and a collaboration with Borsalino yielded some dandy trilbies.








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