VERY | CONTEMPORARY MENSWEAR
In a world that is rapidly recovering its strength after the pandemic, and is ready for exciting challenges, a season of great change is just ahead. Season’s key hashtags can be resumed as these:
#versatility: a crossover style, adaptable to many situations, from smart working to social life comeback, but also in different seasons.
#engagement: political commitment, activism, global social justice. Fighting for an ethical cause making the world a better place. Reviewing the masculinity stereotypes.
#allclusive: not only including diversity and minorities but taking for granted the values of plurality, complexity, diversity, striving for it to become real in every corner of the globe.
#optimism: a good dose of optimism to counteract negative thoughts, negationism, conspiracy theories. Trying to see the positive side of change and evolution.
#metaverse: a non-place linked to the global impact of digitalization. Virtual universes where everything is possible, which will involve a new format of surreal psychedelia and unexpected, electric, experimental colors and materials.
#feelsafe: the importance of feeling protected, certified and traceable materials, anti-bacterial, anti-microbial, sterilized fabrics (also in packaging and logistics).
#regeneration: The preservation of sustainability’s fundamental values, finally endorsed at a global level, but still threatened by a past which sometimes struggles to evolve. Regenerating means recycling, upcycling, creating new bio-based materials and technology, introducing circular economy processes.
MOMPRACHEM
An imaginary place of last century’s appendix literature, represented by the Italian writer Emilio Salgari, who described extraordinarily exotic places, without ever leaving his city, becomes a non-place where disparate influences converge: Indian and Indonesian elements, with some references to the colonial. After taking shelter in reading, we finally return to adventures and travels.
- Materials: Strictly natural, especially certified cotton, but also linen, hemp ramie, vegetable fibers. Pinstripe and micro-striped patterns over light and natural bases.
- Must-haves: The sailor jacket with functional details, the deconstructed peacoat, the Corto Maltese coat, sailor sarong. Shirt collars in Tunisien or in guru style. Indian-inspired mules.
- Colors: light blue and bluish shades, washed-out with accents of fuchsia and terracotta.
INVISIBLE TECH
A style with an indefinable gender, conceived for the man aware of a new, revolutionary masculinity, devoid of the desire to appear, but marked by delicacy, inclusiveness and a certain conscious and playful regressiveness, whose sustainability defines an imperative aesthetic model.
- Materials: Ultra-light fabrics, often transparent or translucent, based on strictly natural, certified, traceable fibers: cotton, linen, often recycled or regenerated. New generation jersey also with delicate abstract or geometric motifs.
- Must-haves: Details taken from workwear, but revisited in a purified way: the shirt jacket with patch pockets, the light overcoat, the lab coat. The cargo, the tubular slack, the oversized chinos, the jogger in knit or fleece.
- Colors: Delicate and imperceptible pastels, aqua green, mint, lightened cerulean blue, candy pink, pearl gray.
OUT THERE!
An invitation to go outside, open-air, rediscovering the nature surrounding cities or to bring colors, materials and design elements, a characteristic of the outdoors into the urban context. A glamping spirit revisited into a city-life edition.
- Materials: Deeply tech-like fabrics. Recycled and regenerated fabrics, but also replaced by innovative and cutting-edge fibers and materials to avoid the use of nylon and highly micro-polluting fibers. Reactive fabrics, antibacterial and antimicrobial fabrics
- Must-haves: Futuristic parkas and utility jackets, city-style climbing jackets, hikers’ garments in an urban edition. 3D knitwear with waffle stitches and embossments
- Colors: Urban camouflage greens, bleached or dusty with acidic accents.
HACIENDA
Halfway between the Patron Saint’s Day, Sundays in the countryside and Central American rural evocations - a revival of formal-wear, in a cool, inclusive, eco-responsible edition, strongly derived from last century’s rural life.
- Materials: Strictly natural, always certified, strongly raw. Cellulosic and vegetable fibers, including innovative ones, cotton, linen, hemp, ramie, but also nettle and waste recycle fibers.
- Must-haves: Blazer, overcoat, oversized trench coat in natural fabrics. Oversized trousers with large waist-pleats, oversized jacket, blouses with vegetable prints or embroidery. Sweater with natural yarns,
- Colors: All shades of raw materials, from natural whites to straw to ecru.
FUNTIME
Nostalgic holidays: halfway between past seaside resorts inspirations, from Malibu to Saint Tropez, a vaguely Mod style revisited in a summery version.
- Materials: Not necessarily natural, but characterized by shiny, silky looks, yet rigorously obtained through ethically sustainable processes and the use of non-polluting fibers. Genuine or vegan leather in details, applications. Checkered, checkerboard, optical, kinetic patterns.
- Must-haves: The 1950s bowling jacket, the cardigan, the knitted jacket. The cigarette trousers, the “motorcycle cut” chinos, the short slack at the ankle.
- Colors: Colored blacks and whites and pale pinks.
NON-TOXIC MACHO
Reviewing the canons of classic masculinity, renewing male stereotypes in a more inclusive and modern version. Inspiration is taken from bikers, motorcycles, garage-style.
- Materials: Canvas, denim, leather, using innovative materials, often recycled or regenerated, (vegan leather), recycled bio-materials. Lace, satin, mesh. Metallic trimmings.
- Must-haves: The trousers and the canvas and/or (vegan) leather. Motorcycle jacket, baggy jeans matched with the garage vest. The classic white tank top, also in a redesigned, printed, perforated, lace version.
- Colors: Black in all its shades with accents of silvery metallic touches
ANDAMAN
Southeast Asia, as an inexhaustible source of inspiration, also for the male world. Colors, materials, patterns, exotic matrix, still little known in the West and very attractive and innovative on a global scale.
- Materials: Rustic and natural fabrics, but also sporty materials, exotic precious silks. A profusion of Thai, Balinese, Indonesian-inspired prints. Patchworks and decorative inlays of heterogeneous materials. Graphic jacquards with exotic or geometric patterns.
- Must-haves: Thai fabric for jackets or cagoules. The oversized sarong pants. The maxi-cardigan jacquard. The super decorative overprinted souvenir shirt.
- Colors: Browny shades reddish, orangy tones with rusty, terracotta hues. Flashes of purple.
TOUGH PREPPY
Sporty hints with some nostalgic references to 70s’ sportswear, to the original HipHop culture, but revised in a contemporary version, while keeping an eye on recycling, upgrading unsold items in a creative key.
- Materials: Purely sporty, with technical inserts and synthetic fibers. Possibly 100% recycled or replaced by innovative materials, elastane-free, adaptable, versatile. Compact jersey, knitted fabrics.
- Must-haves: Upcycled, regenerated sweatshirts, parkas obtained by assembling vintage or unsold garments. Polo in the foreground: oversized, with patches of different materials and colors. 90s baggy jeans.
- Colors: tricolor white, red, blue with accents of bubble pink electric yellow, grassy green.
DENIM SPECIAL- An ALL-INCLUSIVE DENIM
Denim has always been mapped to the working universe, with its protective function, versatility, with no distinction of gender nor ethnicity and social class. The denim of the future will therefore be more and more inclusive, equally meant to different genders. Denim is about to develop cutting-edge ecological treatments to struggle hard the criticisms that had legitimately banned it in recent years, by integrating ethically correct and fully traceable certified materials, while reducing misuse of fundamental resources for our planet. Through a mandatory reassessment phase, denim will surely find again the privileged place it has occupied for years in the wardrobe, not only for men.
