10 Unforgettable Moments in Milan Fashion Week
The youngest of the “big four” fashion weeks – Milan Fashion Week – held its Spring/Summer 2023 shows from September 26th to October 4th, showcasing the crème de la crème of Italy’s fashion scene and upcoming international designers. No longer a glorious banquet for the designers, this year’s MFW intertwined runway shows with a reflection on social issues, crossovers with artists, and frontier technology. Here are the top 10 moments of MFW you might have missed:
Moncler “Extraordinary Forever” Collection at Piazza del Duomo
To celebrate its 70-year history of the search for the extraordinary, Moncler kicked off its 70-day global celebration program with a visually engaging performance where they collaborated with 1952 artists that memorialize the founding year of 1952 and 7 designers who have previously collaborated with the brand. All wearing the white, iconic Maya jacket depicted a perfect picture of Moncler’s future.
2. Gucci’s Twinsburg
Gucci dressed up 68 pairs of identical twins in the same clothes but in a mirror-like way, with each walking solo on one side of the room separated by a screen unknown to the audience. Toward the end of the show, the screen was lifted with each set of twins walking together hand-in-hand.
The brand’s creative director, Alessandro Michele, said that twinning is “so familiar – but so powerful,” as Guardian reported. Inspired by his birth mother, Eralda, and her twin Giuliana, Michele explored the connective problem in society and experimented with the idea of asymmetrical reciprocity.
3. Bottega Veneta Through the View of Gaetano Pesce
The Creative Director Matthieu Blazy enlisted legendary Italian architect Gaetano Pesce to design the scenography of the show. Pesce created 400 distinct chairs integrated with the resin floor. The colorful, loud style praises Italian post-modernism and celebrates diversity, as Pesce said: “This space is a tribute to diversity. It is about the human being; we are all different.” His design echoes the brand’s explorations of identity, people, and community.
4. Prada Expands Modern Femininity Beyond the Stage
The brand’s designers, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons invited film director Nicholas Winding Refn to create a short film around the collection. The film, Touch of Crude, extends the runway collection’s discussion of women and their lives to another creative realm for the image — an expansion of the stage to the world beyond.
5. Versace: Dark Gothic Goddess for Liberated Women
Donatella Versace imbued the runway with dark, purple, and pink, paying homage to the Dark Gothic Goddess. The gothic style celebrated liberated women, especially with the 2000s It-Girl Paris Hilton’s presence at the finale of the show.
6. Economics and Moschino’s Blazing Swimsuit
“Globally, everyone’s been talking about inflation. The cost of everything is going up: housing, food, gas, so I brought inflation to the runway,” said Jeremy Scott, Moschino’s Creative Director. He transformed the economic concept and emergent social situation into the pool toy element in his collection. Scott packs “inflation” with the glamorous, colorful silks reflecting society’s spending and the idea of wealth in appearance, showing how powerful fashion is at expressing significant concern.
7. Diesel Has the World’s Largest Inflatable Sculpture
Diesel’s show began with models coming out of the world’s largest nylon-made inflatable sculpture, along with heavy beats and a warning siren. The sculpture showcases four human bodies with their extremities intertwined within one another, exploring the limits of the human body. This overwhelming presence of the human body expresses Diesel’s creative director Glenn Martens’ idea that “everybody can be part of Diesel.” It’s a record-breaking spectacle for “people who may never have been to a fashion show before.”
8. ANNAKIKI Launching First NFT Series on Runway
The show was inspired by British Director Nic Stacey’s documentary “The Secret Life of Chaos”, which argues that chaos is not a disorder but rather, what creates the essential law and order of life. To further the brand’s cosmological and spatial exploration, the designer Anna Yang, known as the “dimension breaker”, debuted five NFT looks titled “Metacosmos” at MFW that push and break the boundary between physical and cyber form. The NFT collection, as Anna Yang herself described, “creates a unique identification label for the emerging humanity of another parallel dimension.”
9. Dolce & Gabbana Debuted with Kim Kardashian
Though not a designer herself, Kim Kardashian collaborated with the DG duo on an archive of her favorite looks from the 90s and 2000s which they named “Ciao, Kim.” In the archive, Kim selected pieces from collections between 1987-the 2000s, and the designers would rework past elements for the present. Even though Kim didn’t walk the runway like other celebrities during MFW, her appearance at the end of the show still went viral on social media.
10. AVAVAV Tripped Over Models
AVAVAV is famous for its iconic, thought-provoking footwear, “Finger and Claw.” Its creative director, Beate Karlsson, decided to trip up every model (and herself) on stage with the most eye-catching shoes. This sarcastic and seemingly absurd performance art on stage serves to criticize the “fake it until you make it” energy and build the new SS23 collection “Filthy Rich” around the idea of “success and failure.”
