The MM6 collective went all out for its showcase as this season’s Visitor Designer at Pitti Uomo in Florence. In the event that they have been feeling the strain that comes with presenting in a metropolis often called “the style capital of dressy menswear,” as they admitted backstage, what might need made them extra self-conscious was figuring out they’d be measured in opposition to Martin Margiela’s memorable Pitti assortment at Teatro Puccini. That fall 2006 present rendered all in white, with fashions arriving in limos or on Vespas, and coming into by the theater’s major entrance earlier than lining up on stage, then making their method down into the onlooking crowd.
Set at nightfall within the Tepidarium del Roster—a grand glass hothouse constructed within the late nineteenth century inside Florence’s Giardino dell’Orticoltura—this almost all-black present starkly contrasted with its venue’s whimsical Artwork Nouveau structure. It additionally served as a counterpoint, and maybe an unsentimental but elegant homage, to Margiela’s all-white situationist outing 19 years in the past. Fashions walked alongside an elevated platform earlier than mingling with the viewers after the present’s finale.
The gathering unfolded as a glossy, refined, and sensual reinterpretation of basic menswear tropes, described by the collective’s spokesperson as “suggestive of various shades of masculinity.” Marking the primary full MM6 males’s present, the garments reimagined conventional masculine archetypes with a definite Margiela twist. Linen was coated and rubberized to imitate black leather-based; a tuxedo swimsuit was crafted in tinsel-y turquoise lurex tearing open on the seams (“valuable but in addition fucked up”), and black denim was airbrushed to offer the impact of being lit sideways by a fading highlight. These theatrical touches additionally nodded to the trendy stage persona of Miles Davis, whose huge, fastidiously curated wardrobe was featured on the workforce’s moodboard.
The gathering carried a charged undercurrent of kink, apparently impressed by Venus in Fur, Leopold von Sacher-Masoch’s notorious novella in regards to the interaction of submission and domination, fittingly set in Florence. Town, as described by the design workforce’s spokesperson, is pervaded by “a pressure between the chic and the ugly,” a tonal, uncooked sexual vitality that was subtly imbued inside the assortment through slender leather-based whips dangling from trouser sides, tight black chiffon neckties secured with imply leather-based straps, and occasional tufts of femme faux-mink. Finishing the image, the moderately apropos soundtrack featured Pulp’s “That is Hardcore.” All in all, this was a glossier tackle Margiela’s industrial edge, brimming with a assured attractive cool.
