Prêt-à-porter Uomo
Spring/Summer
“As always, when I begin to study a collection, I am confronted with a need: to give an ever stronger reason to design choices and to focus the value of the product. Starting from a new way of being and of presenting oneself to others, one that takes into account an achieved awareness of the body not only as a natural fact, but also as a mental certainty and a cultural choice. From this arises a subtle desire for uniqueness and individuality. A desire that translates into clothing which has gone beyond seasonal constraints, responding instead to the basic need to protect from heat or cold, to changed behaviours, and to an ever more accentuated search for lightness”.
Gianfranco Ferré
2001
Impressions of a journey around a wardrobe. Notes, jottings… the sensuality of a jacket worn closer to the body, with rounded shoulders – a city sportswear in fabrics with drapery patterns or in ostrich, doubled with the finest nappa. The new insubstantiality of pristine, impalpable byssus shirts, almost transparent; of airy linens; of oxford cloths widened and lightened to be mixed with grisailles.
The determining presence of the white shirt; of the “zoned” striped one; of the shirt in raw cloth, embroidered. The signs of a flight towards distant lands, towards the East: double-organza jackets almost without collars, or with a mandarin collar, embroidered and worn over blue trousers in place of a spencer. Silk jeans, their width borrowed from the kimono.
A personal, instinctive search to build, piece by piece, a silhouette that is not pre-established.
EXCERPT FROM THE COLLECTION PRESS RELEASE
Prêt-à-porter Uomo
Fall/Winter
“Rappel à l’ordre: a deep, instinctive need for order and discipline. The need to create one’s own uniform, with a powerful sense of attraction to, and memory of, the uniform. Essential and refined, austere and sumptuous, called by vocation to express strength and even physical power. Imperial uniforms, formal uniforms. A flawless touch, which I chose to mediate by underlining the contemporary approach to menswear: never programmed, never pre-established, always strongly individual. Breaking severity through the rebellion of certain combinations, such as a tuxedo worn with a glossy camouflage-print parka, lined with fur”.
Gianfranco Ferré
2001
To emphasise the seriousness of the garments, a precise and refined range of fabrics and colours has been selected. Dense and classical blends of forest greens, greys and blues, together with powerful autumnal tones with orange inflections, light and mellow camels, black, burgundy and blue for evening coats, long and short, articulated by shirts that are either pristine white or coloured in a tone-on-tone effect.
Materials that confer authority even on the less formal pieces: cover cloth teaseled on the inside, pressed alpaca, cashmere flannel. Even wild astrakhan for robe-style coats.
Within rigorous tailoring, logics and resources have been identified that lend an extraordinary meaning to style. As in garments lined with fur, using vintage mink, sheared in an unconventional way for warm interiors.
In a rich and sumptuous definition of details are concentrated imagination, alchemical passion and a taste for enchanted journeys. By mixing latitudes, overturning climates and inventing a virtual, magical Arctic fauna: for the aviator jacket, bleached Australian opossum reminiscent of Ontario fox; white and grey anaconda, pieced and brushed until it fades into tones of ice and stone; ostrich legs assembled in patchwork evoking fish scales as they dart through the icy waters of the Barents Sea; crocodile sanded and brushed to achieve a prodigious softness.
EXCERPT FROM THE COLLECTION PRESS RELEASE
