Pringle of Scotland Spring/Summer 2016 Menswear

There were plenty of miffed editors on the benches at 10 Corso Como when this show finally started. This is perhaps not the spot to conduct parish business, but the Camera Della Moda seems resolutely ignorant—or, worse, indifferent—to the tedium and the lost time it generates by forcing everyone to blood-clot from one side of this circulatorily compromised city to the other, and then back to where we started again, to attend shows. Come on, guys—sort it out.

So argyles off to Massimo Nicosia for transforming the mood with a magical little Pringle of Scotland presentation. A lot of that magic was conjured by the dance performance of the Michael Clark Company before the clothes showed up. Three couples, muscles straining, moved liquidly in an ode to ply through plié. Then—only an hour late—emerged a collection that couldn’t quite trump the dance for impact, but which was immersive and impressive in and of itself. Silk-cotton parkas and varsity jackets with needlework and intarsia thistle reliefs, shirts printed with sweet days-of-yore Scottish country house sketches, leather net weave-front sweaters, and argyles inspired by the stained glass of St. Giles’ Cathedral or laser-printed in plastic were a few of the creative leaps landed by Nicosia tonight. Less sure-footed was the strapping that half harnessed jackets, but, meh—they kept us up too late to make much of a song and dance about it.