FAY AUTUMN/WINTER 2015-16 READY-TO-WEAR MILAN FASHION WEEK

Something cartoonish and a bit sci-fi pop has been going on chez Fay over the past few seasons. “We felt the need to change, and clean up a bit,” said Tommaso Aquilano and Roberto Rimondi as an introduction to yesterday’s show. The duo also used one of fashion’s adjectives du moment: normal. Not in the sense of normcore—that has thankfully already vanished from the style vernacular. “We thought about the daily demands of contemporary women who lead a hectic lifestyle,” they added, matter-of-factly.

There was a refreshing unpretentiousness to the collection. Pieces looked straightforward and not a tad intellectualized. The gray mannish coat, the tartan duvet, and the white or light blue shirts worn with crewneck jumpers, lean trousers, and brogues were simply faultless pieces. The A-lines and sense of twisted uniformity verged toward the beatnik, but that was just an aftertaste. Getting close to this kind of tightly edited normality requires a lot of application and effort: The line between normal and bland is a perilous one. Aquilano and Rimondi managed to walk on the right side of it. Nothing screamed, but nothing made you yawn, either: The proportions and the colors were just right, and the mix of masculine and feminine was well balanced. Precise—that’s how to describe it.