Milan’s Dream Weavers: How Fashion Week Crafted Fantasies for the Real World
Glenn Martens has opened a portal. He and his team streamed live for four days the entire preparation process leading up to their Diesel Fall 2024 show on Wednesday. This included everything from castings, fittings, and seatings, to set design. Anyone could watch the fashion show come together. The runway was also streamed live. Zoom was amplified and displayed on large screens inside the venue. It was hailed as a radical democratization in fashion but it is really something that comes naturally to a brand such as Diesel and someone with the brain of Martens. This man has fans. Kids who queue up in Milan for a glimpse at Diesel showgoers, or to take part in the fun. He held an open-air, public rave-meets runway show last season. It rained and thousands attended.
Diesel Fall/Winter ’24 Gallery
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Dieselheads are sure to die next season for the patchwork dresses with frayed edges and the leopard jackets which look as if someone lit a lighter to burn fabric. Martens is able to balance novelty and wearability. The outerwear is a great example: bombers and overcoats were trimmed with muppet fur or covered in it all over. This made the models appear to be shuffling along a snowy street somewhere alien and arctic.
Fendi Fall/Winter ’24 Gallery
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Kim Jones is the woman who is responsible for taking Fendi’s women’s ready-to-wear beyond the everyday chic. Jones’s focus this season was on structure and shape, with tailoring that referred to the designer’s heroes such as Yohji Miyake and Issey. The circular-cut coat with a front panel that opened in fall 2024, as well as the jackets featuring precise cinches on the waist, were stunning. The clothes were easy to wear and matched the unfussy ladylike clothing we have seen so far this season.
Prada Fall/Winter ’24 Gallery
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Raf Simons and Miuccia Prada riffed about ideas of glamour and femininity through a highly personal lens. In her show notes, Mrs. Prada stated that “This collection is shaped by the history.” It’s nothing to do with nostalgia. It’s not about nostalgia. She went on to say, “Who were we, why did we dress like that?” It’s all about remembering the past and using that knowledge to move on. She and Simons explore girlhood through various styles and decades. The tight cardigans were color-blocked with knit tops, and the prim overcoats featured colorful silk panels on the back. These cerebral designers aren’t known for their playful designs. But this season, there was a more sweeter edge to them, as seen in the baseball jackets and the amazing feathered riding hats.
Prada’s fall runway featured girls, women, and ladies. It was, in the end a love letter to the changing, evolving sartorial moment of our lives. Prada’s romance is not dead, it’s simply in a state of constant reexamination.
Moschino Fall/Winter ’24 Gallery
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Designers have used words like introspection, dreaming, and contemplation to describe their designs or design philosophy this season. Adrian Appiolaza was one of the designers who used these words to describe their design ethos or the designs themselves this season. He took on the role after Davide Renne died just before he began his new role. Appiolaza had a month and a half to design the fall collection but did so with such passion that it was the highlight of the week. Appiolaza, an emotional Appiolaza told the audience backstage that “It’s all a dream. This is my dream come true.”
Moschino’s brashness, theatricality, and showmanship are well-known. Appiolaza wanted to pay homage to this and Franco Moschino, the founder of the house. The house codes he used were exaggerated sizes, printed silks, and pop patterns. The idea was to show Franco’s universe, and not just think of the collection as ready-to-wear but rather something that told stories with characters. Each “character” represented a single person who was obsessed with a piece of clothing. One model wore ties around her hair wrapped like a towel. She also matched a printed silk top and pants. Another model wore a skirt made of hanging bras. The knits were easy to throw on and go, and the jackets and trenches had that perfect fit only found in thrift stores or inherited from parents or grandparents.
Appiolaza has done a great job here. It will be interesting to see how his vision evolves at Moschino. His work seems to combine the dramatic and the practical, the dreamy and the everyday. Balance is the key to many of the clothes that are currently on the runways. Fashion is about reaching as many people as you can, whether it’s from the front rows, on screens, in stores, or on the streets.
Brooke Bobb, the fashion news director for Harper’s Bazaar is responsible for all print and digital platforms. She was previously a senior editor at Amazon Fashion and a senior fashion writer at Vogue Runway.
