THE SPRING COLLECTION / MILAN : It’s a Good Look and It Makes Good Sense
The Milanese boast that the sightseeing here is crummy--no ancient ruins or atmospheric harbor, and towers useful only as backdrops for souvenir photos. This is a place where business gets done and fashion is created, they will tell you.
The residents of Italy’s second-largest city stride purposefully, chattering into cell phones as they fluently negotiate the bumpy alleys where the fabled shops and fashion houses are. The propaganda has long been that every woman here looks as if she just stepped from the pages of Vogue. In the rectangle of narrow, old streets dedicated to style and in chic restaurants, a few people do look impossibly elegant. But the truth is, there is a uniform here as ubiquitous and predictable as L.A.’s blazer and jeans.
This time of year, with the weather still mild, the good women of Milan wear tailored wool jackets and straight, knee-length skirts, with sensible low-heeled pumps and a single gold brooch pinned on the lapel. And those skinny, long-legged women all in black, tripping on the cobblestones in their high-heeled ankle boots? Oh, they’re just fashion editors from New York, Munich and Los Angeles.
Runway to Reality: It’s funny how many of the most eye-catching clothes on the runway are transformed by the time they reach the stores. When the fall collections were shown here in March, models whose job satisfaction hinges on their degree of exhibitionism closed the Prada show wearing transparent dresses over woolly tights. In the Prada boutiques, the dresses have been lined with a few more layers of fabric. Another dress that first appeared in bright, fuzzy orange wool, with a deeply plunging neckline, is offered in a less revealing cut of smooth brown crepe. A third that began its life in deliberately pilled purple wool reappears in sedate black wool. The pleasant surprise is that the clothes look better in the store than they did in the fashion show.
At Gianni Versace’s Istante shop, the situation is reversed. On the runway, a red jacket, plum trousers, purple turtleneck and yellow gloves made up a clever combination. In the store, light colors all hung together, and the clothes begged for the attention of the stylist that gave the Istante show its zip.
Stores We Love: For many years, Carla Sozzani was an editor for Italian Vogue and Italian Elle. Then she opened Corso Como 10, a unique shop in an ugly commercial neighborhood in north Milan. With an editor’s eye, she selects the best of the international collections. “‘Having a store is like having a magazine,” she says. “You’re communicating, telling people what you believe in.”
A tour of the store is a three-dimensional journey through current style. There’s lots of black, by Yohji Yamamoto and Jean-Paul Gaultier; a Corso Como private label collection of velvet separates in rich jewel tones; and orange, fuchsia and lime poor-boy sweaters. Sozzani wanted the store to be “a meeting point for people.”
The second floor houses a gallery and bookstore. Moroccan tea sets, mosaic china and alabaster candles the size of small tables are for sale in one room. Cases of Victorian jet jewelry, fountain pens and sunglasses from London are scattered in the main space, where curtains of copper curlicues separate areas of clothes, each with its own chandelier. The illuminated mobiles of yellow and red and pale blue glass could have been designed by Miro.
“I tried to be commercial, but it’s hard, because I was a journalist too long,” Sozzani says. “I just put things in the store that I like.”
