As London melts in tropical humidity, men's fashion week in Milan has been set against a backdrop of sweltering 32C heat. If this is the future of summer, surely anything but a linen shirt and shorts on men is remiss?
That particular fabric - the mainstay of the summer months - has been a go-to solution for designers contemplating how to negotiate this new climate-crisis terrain. But Giorgio Armani, the powerhouse who back in the 1980s defined a lighter, softer way of dressing for men, offered up variations that steered away from linen - too easily crumpled, too dishevelled for the immaculate Bello Uomo of the Armaniverse.
A cooling breeze of a collection in Aeolian Sea blues, ice grey and slate tones focused on light silks, flyaway technical fabrics and waffle knits (great for aeration). The focus was on his deconstructed, fluid tailoring; jackets in a wide-weave cotton fluttering as models walked, blazers with just a scarf around the neck and nothing else (daring, but appealing if you've got the body) and an "and breathe" approach to proportions.
Armani has been at the forefront of this sense of ease for men; his hallmark has always been making men look masculine and sophisticated in soft-fit shapes. Where other brands use teenage boys to showcase their sunken-cheeked proportions, Armani's is a grown-up world. That's not a sentence that should be remarkable in men's fashion, but in a landscape of coltish limbs and clavicles, it is.
On the subject of light dressing, another Italian designer took a different view. Alessandro Sartori, the creative director of tailoring house-cum-mega-brand Zegna, focused on manipulating linen to make it robust and functional, showing his collection amongst bales of raw linen flax destined for production after the show.
The designer has the capacity to do so, given the colossal R&D factory in Trivero, near the Italian Alps, which experiments with all forms of fabrication. Sartori utilised this ability to innovate with textiles and applied a more solid structure to linen in a series of light suit jackets, tops that sat apart from the body (with deep Vs on the neckline - very welcome in the midday sun) and collarless jackets that had the stuffing taken out of them. There were no linings whatsoever - a clean, unfettered approach.
Sartori's preoccupation with suiting feels relevant to today. Suit sales have bounced back since the pandemic, but Sartori knows better than anyone that men don't wear tailoring like the old captains of industry used to (see the "digi-disrupter" styling of Succession character Kendall Roy, a fan of Zegna).
His version of a suit comes with cropped track trousers, or with a blazer featuring the lapel embossed into the chest rather than cut out in the traditional manner. His proposal also looks at different combinations of what comprises a "suit" - "matching trousers with a linen top in the same fabric, that can be a new suiting uniform".
If temperatures continue to climb, you can bet that classic suiting and all the weight that goes with it - shirts, proper shoes, ties - will be a thing of the past, too.
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