Salvatore Ferragamo Fall/Winter 2016 Milan

MILAN, JANUARY 17, 2016

by LUKE LEITCH

Massimiliano Giornetti literally based every look in this collection upon a shoe designed by his employer’s founder that was once owned by Andy Warhol. The artist purchased a pair of Ferragamo oxfords—apparently the only for-men shoe style the Bonito-born footwear maestro ever designed—and wore them to paint in. Following Warhol’s death, casa Ferragamo bought Warhol’s shoes, complete with a random scatter of different-colored paint spatters.

Reproductions of these doubly touched-by-genius oxfords thus grounded every look here today. Big shoes to step into. Giornetti made a fair fist of it though. He said he was exploring a dialectic of sartorial classicism and fashion artistry. This translated into a suite of impeccable luxury outerwear and suiting featuring Giornetti’s favorite close silhouette, cast against knits and shirts that rioted with technical invention.

The first look’s white mac represented the blank canvas on which all after was painted. A sweater that amalgamated black strata of mink over a white panel of shearling in a panel on a decorated knit sweater sleeved in leather was virtuoso fabrication. Mario Giacomelli’s saturated monochrome photographs of ploughed fields defined the decoration of a wonderful confusedly rippling bomber, and the colors and chaos of Egon Schiele’s detailing baselined crashing pattern on knitwear and shirting.

But forget all this “arty schmartery”: because, the coats. Sickly sheened olive nylon bombers and parkas lined with shearling; a Japanese nylon and shearling bomber; a three-piece suit of duffels and fur-collared coverts—all were wonderful. Giornetti’s suiting silhouette is knocking on the door of two-years-ago anachronism, and his artist-heavy practice lacks the blood-and-thunder urgency emotion. What he has, though, is precise exactitude. And paint-spattered shoes.