K-Pop meets White Lotus in the front row

Old style and new media converged at men's fashion shows in Milan

MILAN — It's been nearly 72 years since Giovanni Battista Giorgini, scion of an old Florentine family, telephoned a group of American shoppers attending the spring haute couture shows in Paris and invited them to attend a show fashion at home.

Five accepted. They were Seventh Avenue designer Hannah Troy and buyers from B. Altman and Bergdorf Goodman of New York, I. Magnin of San Francisco and Morgan's of Montreal. Giorgini's experiment was so successful that the shows were soon moved to Palazzo Pitti, attendance increased, and the cornerstone of a post-war Italian fashion industry was laid.

It's doubtful Giorgini could have imagined that seven decades later Italian fashion shows would attract thousands of guests, with an equal number of press and crowds clamoring for glimpses of attendees at fashion shows like members of K-pop boy group Enhypen.

As much as any fashion show or catwalk (or personal guessing game; we see you, Gucci), it's the continuity of Giorgini's vision that struck an observer this week and how enduring and robust Italy's assertion over the primacy of fashion remains.

Saturday's Fendi show is a good example. Held at the company's headquarters, on a set that featured a suspended Rube Goldberg contraption, Silvia Venturini Fendi's menswear presentation could have served as a mission statement to explain why Italian design still matters. It's no exaggeration to say that the designer has taken on some of the most nagging cultural anxieties - mostly about sex and safety - and cloaked them in clothes that, while revealing the male body in unorthodox ways (one-shoulder sweaters, for example), simultaneously enveloped her in forms that were simultaneously swaddled, protective, and impossibly luxurious.

There were elegant coats from the gray ine that swept the floor. There were fringed capes reminiscent of a Fendi interpretation of the old Venetian tabarro cape. There were, of course, the various finely processed leather bags and garments associated with a brand established in Rome in 1925 as a leather goods store. More deeply rooted, however, are hints of a quietly assured manner, a kind of grandpa typical of the Milanese bourgeoisie and which has caught the eye of street photographers like Scott Schuman of The Sartorialist.

You won't often see the two labels mentioned in the same sentence, but if Fendi represents a face of Italianness, Dsquared is sort of the flip side of the same coin. Twin designers Dean and Dan Caten are Toronto natives. Yet, having lived and worked in Milan for decades, they are honorably local, and as such have adopted an almost stereotypical Italian style of sartorial mash-up - exuberant, silly, full of references and devoid of specific context. /p>