Brioni Fall/Winter 2016 Milan

We started with an expensive, impressive, immersive projection of a snowy forest shot from the point of view of someone in rotation, dizzily. On the soundtrack, Björk Björk-ed, with all her glorious ethereal insistence. Were we about to witness some kind of snowbound breakdown for Abruzzo tailoring’s finest? Not so much. This was more of a lunchtime daydream, an Alpine projection from low altitude to high and back again—all before slipping back behind your desk.

The suits were beautiful, sculpted on the body, with waists pushed high to elongate the whole. We began with a suite of grays, but then the injection of hiking boot instead of city shoe pointed to an ascent ahead. The colors shifted—a transition from the urban to the natural—into a loden heartland of deciduous greens. There were two extraordinary furs of monochrome snippets grafted into herringbone. Our man was high, yet still observing his usual patterns. There was a sort of artist’s smock and a recurring Beuys-meets-Alpine hat that whispered of repressed ambitions gathering force.

Backstage Brendan Mullane outlined the layers of sandblasting and overprinting, addition and subtraction that had been applied to these clothes to lend them their pentimento depths. Brioni is rooted in a long-evolved formalism, an exquisitely evolved mask of a man. Yet Mullane tests the limits of this formalism and, as he does so, discovers that it still has some uncharted territories to dream through.