With its glamour, energy, innovation and style, the 2018 Milan Fashion Week ended on February 26^th, leaving its audience with curiosity and excitement for what Fall and Winter fashion will bring. Every year Milan welcomes more than 170 fashion shows during this important week, gathering passionate professionals and spectators to see the Made in Italy, in the flesh. In this sense, Italian fashion houses fully displayed their capabilities to impress and leave their mark, showing once again, the inextricable link between creative genius and business. 

Being a crossroad between Italian tradition and European modernity, the young and international environment that is Milan, is the perfect set for combining innovation and history, past and present, well-known designers and new ones. 

This year, the many events and fashion shows seemed to share the intention to amaze the audience with special effects, stunning locations and innovative backgrounds. As Anna Wintour said in an interview with Vogue America, “How wonderful that designers are really looking at the shows in different ways and thinking [about] how they can be used as expressions, whether it’s for the customer or the press, in new and thrilling ways.” 

It’s clear designers, famous or not, are increasingly focused on the fashion show as a means of expression, using its full potential. This way of approaching fashion shows, has made fashion into more of a form of art, and these Milanese fashion shows have successfully combined business with creativity.

From the ever-winter atmosphere created by Moncler, to the appropriation of an art space at the Prada Foundation, and the profanely fascinating Dolce and Gabbana “fashion devotion,” to the surgical set of the Gucci runway, designers created countless sources of creative inspiration for the new ready to wear Fall/Winter season. The big names of Italian fashion represented this idea at its very best.

As Miuccia Prada alluded to, when discussing her fashion show, fashion is as an serious endeavor as contemporary art, even though it’s usually looked down on by artists.  By occupying the space of art, she admits, with her fashion show, she wanted to take a sort of emblematic “revenge on the art world”. Her runway, that took place in the newest addition to the Prada Foundation, the Rem Koolhaas extension, combined many elements of the maison’s past motives (animal prints, tweed fabrics, among others) with fluorescent, hi-tech sportswear, man-made materials and digital prints, all mixed with a never-missing feminine touch with tulle, bows and corsetry elements. To paraphrase her words, the dream within the collection is to create an image of a woman who is free to dress as she pleases, without fearing the judgment over her choices or her femininity, and using exaggeration as a tool of self-expression and self-motivation.

Donatella Versace’s newest collection seemed to share this message of a strong woman capable of standing out from the crowd thanks to her personal style: bold colors, high heels, pop-inspired prints and colorful sneakers were part of the collection.

Opening the series of events was this year the Italian Remo Ruffini who worked very hard on the relaunch of his Moncler brand. Eight different young designers (Pierpaolo Piccioli, Simone Rocha, and Craig Green, to name a few), with eight different inspirations and concepts, presented their interpretation of the Moncler essence without renouncing their own personal touch.

If one of the key-words for these F/W collections was amazement, Gucci wins the prize for the best outcome of the concept: walking in a reproduction of a surgical room, Alessandro Michele’s models were dressed as trans-human beings from different worlds and cultures: some of them were carrying a replica of their own head, some others a baby dragon, many had their head covered with knitted balaclavas, to suggest a post-surgical state. The idea behind the collection, described by Michele, “There’s a clinical clarity about what I am doing. I was thinking of a space that represents the creative act. I wanted to represent the lab I have in my head. It’s physical work, like a surgeon’s.”

The unease given by the bright lights of the set, also, along with the procession of disturbing figures wearing the clothes, problematizes the difficulty for the human brain in dealing with infinite inputs of the modern era. At the core of the collection there is a mix of 80s pop culture, Russian and Chinese traditional clothing such as babushka headscarves and pagoda hats, English and Scottish-inspired tweeds, all mixed with Michele’s signature prints.

Discomfort could have been a feeling for many after watching the impressive show put together by the Sicilian duo of Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana: their “Fashion Devotion” runway has probably been considered inappropriate by someone but, the designers assure, they only wanted to highlight the strict connection fashion has with every aspect of our life: “Fashion is not work, fashion is devotion,” Dolce said. “You live, sleep and eat with fashion, you never stop thinking about it and you love it with all your heart.”

And so, their catwalk was opened by drones (and many of them!) carrying signature handbags, with, in the background, the recreation of the façade of the baroque Oratorio di Santa Cita church in Palermo, Sicily. The first model was wearing a shirt with the words “Fashion sinner”, and the whole theme echoed a catholic ceremony of communion. Their materials reminded of the ones used in the clothes making of religious people: brocades, velvet, furs, bright colors, crowns and flowers, as well as statement yellow gold jewelry pieces inspired by religious iconography.

Through fabrics, colors, designs, shapes and accessories, these designers expressed, in different but harmonious ways, the idea that fashion, even when it is ready to wear and therefore more accessible to the public than haute couture, could and should be considered a powerful tool of artistic self-expression, from the makers to the users, a way individuals can use to define themselves.