July 30, 2014 |
It’s one of those things that always make you do a double take. You’re sitting at a show, a menswear show, and then suddenly, as if out of the blue, a girl appears. Well, a gamine creature, but with long, flowing hair. So you do the double take. You peer closer. At the hair, the face, the clothes. Is it a girl? Or just a very pretty boy? No boy could ever have such delicate wrists, you think. (Not without surgery, but does wrist surgery actually exist?) This is what happened at Andreas Melbostad’s first menswear collection for Diesel Black Gold, shown at Pitti Uomo in Florence. In hindsight, the girls were easy to tell apart from the boys. Some even wore dresses. But as the mention of Uomo with Pitti would suggest, this was about men, and after a day spent admiring men’s fashions, a girl on a men’s runway was unexpected, a sort of jolt of electricity to wake you up. And the girls weren’t girly. They were just girls. Dressed how girls dress. Not fashion girls who spend their lives dressing up and changing three times a day for street-style photographers, but normal girls. Girls who are cool and don’t give much thought to what combination of things was lying on the floor next to their beds that morning, girls who have better things to worry about or get on with than wondering if their tights-shoe pairing is ironic enough. Girls who just are. Girls who dress in polos and baggy shorts, with slouchy boots and oversized parkas in shades of grey and black, retain a sense of mystery about themselves. Who is she and where is she going? What does she do? You would never guess from her clothes. Which is kind of the point. There’s a reason personality survived evolution. Unless you choose to work in uniform, how much do you really want your clothes to say about you? People make assumptions based on what you wear all the time. You know they do. You do it yourself. You did it on the Tube this morning. And what’s with all this crap about dressing for other women? They will be the first to sit there, looking at you, making silent, seething judgments in their head. Which, to be honest, they will do no matter what you happen to be wearing, because most women are secret bitches. But no matter – why not just be? And really, what more do you want from clothing than function? Which is what the ladies at Diesel presented at Pitti. Clothes that function but just so happen to make you look like the queen bee without even trying. What more could ask for from a sweater?
By Natalie Dembinska
