Italian Fashion Brands Make a Novel Pitch: ‘Real Clothes’

The streets of Milan are alive with the sound of English. On baking June afternoons, American tourists in droves are ordering veal Milanese in trattorias, snapping selfies outside the Duomo and toting around bulging shopping bags from keen luxury labels like Zegna, Armani and Gucci.

This season, the Italian fashion labels are delivering a wealth of wearable fodder to feed those paper parcels: The weightiest trend on display at Milan men’s fashion week, which wrapped on Monday, was a predilection toward what could best be described as “real clothes.” Brands like Prada, Neil Barrett and even the high priests of baroque styles, Dolce & Gabbana, sent out focused collections built upon items like straight-legged jeans, pin-sharp black suits and tailored shorts.

“The beauty of today is that people are finally looking at real clothes again, and it’s not just about jersey T-shirts and sweatshirts,” said Barrett backstage after a show of wardrobe fundamentals like graphite short-sleeve shirts, gray trousers and polished black boots from his brand, which is based in Italy. Barrett, who is British, was returning to the runway after an extended hiatus and drew inspiration from the archives of his own brand and his many years working at another Milan-based label, Prada. “There’s real people out there with real businesses,” who need real clothes, he said.

Raf Simons, co-creative director of Prada, also gave a shout-out backstage to the “real man” and the uncomplicated things he wears: “jeans, pants, a white shirt, utilitarian photographer’s jacket.” Several looks in Prada’s well-received collection echoed the workmanlike style of the artist Joseph Beuys.

Simons said he and Miuccia Prada began with the elemental white shirt, sprawling out to include curt pleated shorts, straight-cut jeans and button-up-weight blazers with button cuffs as a new, very literal update on the shirt jacket.

Simons also said the pair was looking at how to “liberate” the codes of tailoring from as far back as the 1940s to plumb a fresh form of sartorial ease. Those featherweight, lapelled shackets had removable shoulder pads. “Every piece is actually really constructed like a shirt, there’s nothing inside, whether it was shirt material or wool,” he said.

Overall, the wares at Milan fashion week conveyed cultivated European luxury. Americans “want a taste of culture, they want a taste of connoisseurship, they want a taste of elegance, old money is in style, and more than that, quality is in fashion,” said the content creator known as Gstaad Guy, a British-raised, U.S.-educated 20-something whose droll Instagram videos wryly lampoon old-money culture. He was speaking after a dinner for the luxuriant Italian label Loro Piana. “The fact that the affluent of the U.S. are now very Eurocurious, vacationing more in Europe and spending more like Europeans, is not a coincidence,” he said.

He shrewdly drew a comparison between the traditional old-money labels in America and abroad. While the gold-buttons-and-popped-collars preppy look of entrenched U.S.-founded brands Brooks Brothers and Vineyard Vines has been mothballed for years, the allure of more aspirational, easy-wearing European luxury brands is only surging.

“I’ve always found European style just more tailored and stylish,” said Andrew Weitz, a Los Angeles-based style consultant to entertainment and finance executives. “That’s what I try to bring to all my clients at home. It’s how we should all be dressing.”

Weitz was pleased then by the sea of Americans he saw frequenting Milan’s tony shopping promenades. “You can see the influx when you walk around in Milan on Via Monte Napoleone, like how many people actually are here, how many people are actually purchasing,” he said. Their presence reflects a broader trend: According to a report from travel-insurance company Allianz Partners, travel to Europe from the U.S. is up 55% over the last year.

Throughout Milan men’s week, designers offered options in ease-stoking staples that felt as carefree as an afternoon in the Lombardy sun.

1017 ALYX 9SM., known for its hard-edge, heavily-treated creations, showed a capried gray sweatsuit and a serene matching pant set that looked like something plucked from a karate dojo. Valentino presented a medley of swoopy off-the-calf shorts and past-the-elbow T-shirts; and Giorgio Armani dove in with prodigious pleated linen trousers and buoyant double-breasted suits.

They were pieces that nodded reverently to Armani’s own extensive archive—a veritable Library of Alexandria of elegant ease. Many of the immense trousers looked nearly identical to the same well-aged Armani pants that 20-something shoppers are searching for on the cheap at resale sites like Depop and stores like New York’s Lara Koleji.

“I think young people are loving to be quite untouched by the clothes,” said Etro creative director Marco De Vincenzo, just before a show peppered with a bevy of barrell-size shorts and kicked-out pants that stretched into JNCO territory.

“I have to now educate all my clients that, hey, we’re not so tailored and tapered, [pants are] looser, more easy in the thigh and the bottom,” said the style consultant Weitz, just before a Zegna show brimming with roomy linen trousers and off-the-body overshirts. “You’re going to see in the next few years Americans catch up.”

First Via Monte Napoleone, then the world.