MAD (WO)MAN
Fall Winter 2011-12
March 1, 2011
By Gianmarco Gentile
Milan, Italy – Frankie Morello’s new Fall Winter 2011/12 collection is clearly inspired by multiple-award-winning American TV show “Mad Men”, and the inspiration is made explicit starting from the title of the collection: Mad (Wo)Man.
The Fifties, perceived as the ultimate, unrepeatable and unreachable heights of elegance, were fiercely de-contextualized mixing pure citations with digressions. The show started with a double breasted, golden and grey lurex tuxedo worn with a white shirt and a matching golden tie, soon followed by a black woolen flared skirt with a micro-jacket. Grey Prince of Wales fabric, striped, Al Capone look-alike suits and vinyl dresses clearly reminding Christian Dior’s 1955 collections were shown, conveying a clear feeling of nostalgia mixed with the real trademark of the House: irony.
Gold and golden details made its return also to Frankie Morello (as they made it actually everywhere else), this time in the form of hundreds of hairdresser clips applied to trains and evening dresses, as if to symbolize a tongue-in-cheek tribute, not a copying. A black chiffon shirt carrying the writing “50’s is the golden age” was shown, so to unmistakably testify that 50s are back. To be true to this statement, many outfits and accessories had a clear Fifties feeling, like flared golden skirts worn with black suspenders for men on a white shirt, headbands, black-and-white décolletés, a three-piece golden painted gabardine suit (so gangster-like), the aforementioned Al Capone striped black trouser suit, although also hyper-feminine looks were featured, i.e. orange fitted feathered boleros worn on black mini dresses.
Yet together with Fifties, other decades had their tribute throughout the fashion show. ‘60s were recalled with a red leather tuxedo reminding, in its shapes, Yves Saint Laurent’s first woman’s trouser suit (1967). ‘80s had their shot when we saw golden chains applied all over black long dresses, a red vinyl mermaid-shape long dress modernized with crisscross golden zippers, or when a black studded little leather jacket worn on a flounced black chiffon dress was shown and took us back to Madonna’s ”Like A Virgin” period (1985). Other designers too were implicitly cited in this temporal mix of fashion history, like Gianfranco Ferrè (in his fall 1989 collection gold versus black, lurex, androgynous looks and ultra-soft leather were the key elements), but everything was brilliantly treated with irony and re-invented to be adapted to contemporary times.
