Pre-fall collections typically require designers to behave as agile tightrope walkers, torn between market calls for to dilute their edge for broader client attraction and the need to uphold their creative excessive requirements. This pressure most of the time sparks conflicts between model administration and artistic groups, contributing to the turnover of designers main trend homes we’re seeing in the present day. The unsure state of the posh market has made this wrestle much more pronounced.
No designer is immune from the strain. At Etro, Marco De Vincenzo is striving to stability the model’s heritage along with his forward-thinking imaginative and prescient. “It’s each thrilling and difficult,” he remarked, acknowledging that this friction has expanded his perspective and flexed his adaptability muscle tissue, permitting him to protect integrity whereas navigating limitations.
As a designer drawn extra to graphic, kinetic maximalism than to the languid attraction of flowing frocks, negotiating the model’s boho legacy has confirmed difficult. Nonetheless, it appears he has discovered his stride, with pre-fall serving as a springboard to refine his personal method to the model. Etro’s signature billowy silhouettes took on a brand new slender type in stretchy silk jersey, hugging the physique with youthful, sexier strains and printed with sparse floral prints that felt lighter and extra restrained in comparison with previous designs. The identical hourglass form appeared in quotidian staples like coats, blazers, and minidresses, the place the waistline was emphasised and formed by a hand-made leather-based lace-up motif, as in a slender cashmere coat in subdued tone-on-tone caramel paisley.
A good-looking instance of De Vincenzo’s creative but real looking vibe was a camel straight-cut masculine coat whose chunky sides and sleeves had been knitted in a vivid summary sample. He referred to as it a “cut-and-paste specimen, a crossbreed between a jumper and a metropolis coat,” the place a reductionist perspective (“I’m making an attempt to simplify and discover a form of minimalist spirit in Etro,” he mentioned) coexisted with a artful wanderlust.
Just a few males’s appears to be like had been introduced alongside the ladies’s, reflecting a method extra aligned with the preferences of the standard clientele of the label. De Vincenzo’s tenure at Etro isn’t about radical transformation—not all revolutions unfold abruptly.