MSGM Spring 2017 Menswear

Massimo Giorgetti’s MSGM first made its mark via its youthfulness—something which, for a long time, was in short supply in Milan. He’s trading on both that perception, and that appeal, despite the fact the label is approaching its first decade in business. Nevertheless, the Spring MSGM show began with pulsing Acid house music and fluorescent tubes blinking to a rave beat—even though Giorgetti’s self-declared favorites run more the path of MGMT and The Strokes. “It’s a moment of energy,” he said backstage, in front of an inspiration board pinned with images of teenage revellers sometime in the early ’90s. “I wanted it to feel like you’d just come out from a rave, euphoric!”

How to reflect that in the clothes? Giorgetti latched onto the work of Massimo Vitali, an Italian artist whose photographic works center around crowds of people, much like the bobbing heads at a rave. Giorgetti reproduced those images on his clothes, mixed with images of hyper-colored trees pulled from Beastie Boys videos, and a bunch of florals that seemed like the chintzy foliage MSGM has been drawn to before, but turned out to be an image pulled from the Bruce Weber–directed video for the Pet Shop Boys’s “I Get Along.” The varied images blurred fuzzily into one another: heads looking like roses, roses resembling the bleached and stone-washed denims that often bottomed-out the look with slender jeans. “Hazy, like memories,” said Giorgetti. “It’s not a chemical vision!” Sure, but the eye-boggling warped argyles wriggling across intarsia knits and poplin wound up pretty trippy.

The garments themselves were fuss-free and basic: sweaters and sweatshirts, the season’s must-have nylon parka. On the top, the shapes were either T-shirts and knits oversize and multilayered, or shrunken tight against the body like early-’90s clubbing gear. There was lots of denim, a uniform for the under-thirties. Straightforward. At times, there were slight shades of Raf Simons to the clothes. Which is understandable: Simons’s influence on the whole of fashion is marked, and many of the subcultural styles Giorgetti referenced indirectly have been mined by Simons too. A few others, late of the twentieth and early of the twenty-first centuries, have been shaped by Simons’s aesthetic.