Etro staged its presentation within the dim again rooms of a Brera trattoria, swapping white cubes for low mild and a faintly Wunderkammer-ish environment. The area was intimate and plush, populated by mannequins topped with Venetian-made papier-mâché animal heads—foxes, owls, rams, bears—turning the show right into a well-dressed menagerie with impeccable desk manners.
Marco De Vincenzo defined that the masks nodded to Etro’s 1997 photographic marketing campaign, devised by Kean Etro throughout his tenure as artistic director. The thought hinged on physiognomy, the notion that human traits usually mirror animal ones, and that our most refined behaviors nonetheless relaxation on pretty primal instincts. “I assumed the imagery was genius,” he stated, and so he introduced it again. It felt much less like an archive quotation than a realizing throwback: odd, and barely camp. The gathering was known as Ani-men, a portmanteau of ‘animal’ and ‘males.’
De Vincenzo forged his Ani-men within the low mild of a forest at nightfall, which felt like their pure habitat. Their palette ran to dense browns, velvety greens, and sensuous garnet reds, the sort of shades that recommend camouflage, or not less than discretion. They drifted between velvet paisley-splashed robes and slouchy pajamas; once they suited up, they did so impeccably in slim-lapelled tailoring trimmed with feathers and matched with equally feathery waistcoats. Plumage, right here, was a matter of heraldry. The candy faces of deer peeked out in pixelated jacquards on plush knitwear. Paisley, inevitably, was all over the place, much less a motif than a genetic marker, sealing the Ani-men’s lineage and pedigree.
The presentation unfolded to the hypnotic hum of Wendy Carlos’s scores, a composer De Vincenzo has lengthy admired. “She wrote the soundtracks for A Clockwork Orange and The Shining,” he defined. “Her most well-known album was an digital rewire of Bach, and I assumed: ‘she’s doing precisely what I’m doing.’ She was each celebrated and criticized for it, an inventor who reworked current music. And that’s exactly what I’m doing at Etro: rewriting the previous, reshaping it, and remixing it into some new beat.”
