Prada and Armani Reassert the Power of Consistency

MILAN �" One of the commonest sights outside fashion shows, in whatever city they’re held, is hordes of shutterbugs racing to snap pictures of what is loosely described as “street fashion.” Often the photographers form a phalanx, a kind of flying wedge, and back shoulder to shoulder into traffic snapping away as their quarry advances. They’re like crazy birders. Watch them long enough, though, or track their Instagram accounts and you will soon observe that they’re tracking just one kind of bird: the fashion cuckoo.

There is that Japanese personage seen at so many shows dressed in plus-fours, or short shorts and wearing a platinum blonde wig reminiscent of Joey Heatherton (Google her: worth a look.) There is the guy who routinely pulls off the full Henry Higgins, with a cape, gloves of mustard leather, even a pipe. There’s the charming, and shrewd, style writer for a major Italian daily who turned up everywhere throughout the past wintry week here shod in fake-fur (or pelle ecologica, to use the hilarious Italian term) sandals from Ainea.

Spend any time among these ambulating punch lines �" characters that seem to have swapped immersion in daily life for the nebulous reality of the web �" and you start hankering for a little pre-Kardashian-era propriety.

Miuccia Prada expressed something like that feeling in an exceptionally fine show on Sunday, one that came accompanied by a written manifesto. The message she had in mind had to do with the reality that “gender is context and context is often gendered.”

While this formulation may come as a revelation to some in the fashion vortex, in academic terms it is so dated as to be ... vintage. Practically speaking, though, what her statement signified was that Ms. Prada was simultaneously showing clothes for women and men (pre-fall for women, fall for men.)

The more relevant cultural import of Ms. Prada’s new turn in direction �" at least in this observer’s eyes �" came from a clear ambition to eschew anything designed first to please the camera and those who voraciously and compulsively scan their social media feeds.

By presenting a collection �" in a series of chambers with stark metal floors and ceilings �" largely restricted to shapes so anonymous as to seem generic (Prada generic, that is: all the black nylon referred to a fabric that first put this label on the map), Ms. Prada seemed to be returning to a set of values she would have known in a girlhood spent in the Milanese haute bourgeoisie.

“Uniform, severe, elegant: This is the fashion I like at this moment,” Ms. Prada was quoted as saying of the starkly simple coats and eight-button suit jackets and unostentatiously conservative somber clothes any man might be happy to be own �" that is, if he didn’t mind knowing he couldn’t get arrested on Instagram dressed like that.

Ms. Prada was far from the only designer who gave signs of moving away from social media brand showmanship, toward greater reserve and personal calm.

Thom Browne and Giorgio Armani, two names seldom heard in the same sentence, each offered shows that in their essence distilled their historical strengths, Mr. Browne for Moncler Gamme Bleu and Mr. Armani for both Emporio Armani and his main Armani line.

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Both Moncler Gamme Bleu and Emporio Armani started with a bit of theatrics. At Moncler, clusters of models in down jackets colored one of four different ways, and with skull caps, goggles and snap-side trousers, entered a show space where paper birch trees had been installed at regular intervals, an anomalous hanger suspended from each. At some unseen signal, strobe lights were cued, the models all whipped off their trousers and, voilà, “Magic Mike.”

At Emporio Armani, a posse of models clad in cat-burglar suits (actually Armani’s EA7 ski wear) skittered onto the runway in semi-darkness to form a tableau. Cue models with flashlights. Cue glimpse of pulchritude. Exit models runway right.

Some theater is always not only a welcome but necessary way for fashion show viewers to relieve the numberless hours spent in unnatural states of forced passivity.

Only afterward do the theatrics fall away and one becomes aware that Mr. Armani, in his masterful way, has deployed again the tools, techniques and concern for male beauty to which he has remained true for decades �" showing for his Giorgio Armani show, titled “Romance,” snugly shaped and soft suiting in muted tones, cocooning fur scarves, full trousers that tapered from waist to cuff in a slightly feminizing manner, jackets that fell somewhere between blazer and a bomber; shaped suits and beautifully simple coats; and then, more compellingly, at Emporio Armani, cropped snug jackets over ribbed leggings in a near-monochrome palette; as surface ornament, a bold pattern resembling a paint brush stroke, trousers with diagonal zippers that cut from waistband to ankle. The latter struck a viewer as both ingenious and perplexing. How, precisely, was a wearer supposed to ... well, never mind.

Mr. Browne, too, had a simple core message, one that returned him to the down-filled puffer jackets he designed after going into partnership with Remo Ruffini, the Italian industrialist and savant who revived what had been a faded ski-wear label and so successfully restored its cool he ultimately fielded one of the more successful fashion stock market offerings in recent memory.

There were countless feats of design bravado for fashion historians to record at the Moncler show. There always are. Mr. Browne is steely in how he manages to turn virtually any design reference �" steeplechase jockeys, Siena’s Palio horse race, harlequins �" to his idiosyncratic ends.

Finally, though, and as most everyone knows, few of the designs seen on a Moncler runway are destined for production. What you are destined to see everywhere is the show’s obvious moneymaker. It was a perfectly simple, deep-blue, waist-length puffer jacket a lot of men will stretch to own.

“That’s exactly the one I want,” Federico Marchetti, chief executive of Yoox, the online retailer, laughed merrily as he made his way into the chill evening. Likely Mr. Marchetti will have something left of his paycheck after that particular purchase. That is more than you can say for a lot of other Moncler customers.

The fantasy that money is no object has always underscored the Bottega Veneta message, mystifying to some extent those lacking intimate experience of the ultra-rich. There are some who have trouble imagining a young billionaire hankering for a pair of outsized pump-jockey jeans that look as if they were inherited from a Walker Evans sharecropper. But what do we know?

Tomas Maier, at Bottega Veneta, is another designer so confident of his taste and customer base he consistently pulls off perverse feats of wizardry. Pull-on trousers worn with a blouson? He showed them. Colors suggestive of a field trip to the Pantone lab while high on acid? There they were. (The color names alone �" nero, mallow, russet, persimmon and ardoise �" were a trip.)

What’s disarming is how assuredly Mr. Maier taps into a customer base whose sartorial ambition amounts to a kind of exaggerated nonchalance with design pairings like pink (or mallow) washed corduroy trousers worn with a nero (black to you) silk tie, a light gray (ardoise) cashmere sweater with russet flocking and a jacket of camel-hair hue.

Mr. Maier lives part time in South Florida, as is well known. Perhaps a bit of the eccentricity of dress so characteristic of the subjects depicted in Harry Benson’s photographs for the book “Palm Beach People” has rubbed off on him. That pink trousers and camel hair coat get-up? You’ll see wackier ensembles by far at Hamburger Heaven on North Clematis Street in West Palm any hangover Sunday morning.

If, as was strenuously asserted by a Gucci spokesman, the runway show on Monday bore no imprint of the ousted Frida Giannini and was assembled by the head accessories designer Alessandro Michele and a workroom team in under a week, it may not be fair to judge this collection as anything other than a placeholder between old and new.

But with the news on Wednesday that the little-known Mr. Michele had been named creative director of both men’s and women’s wear, a collection created on a cliffhanger deadline took on a different significance.

The hearty ovation greeting the team members when they all came onto the runway for a postshow bow better reflected admiration for effort than praise for a collection that leaned far too heavily on androgyny tropes no one has had much success with at Gucci since Tom Ford. Were the boys-will-be-girls-will-be-boys casting, the overfamiliar gender blur, the crepe and chiffon and pipe-cleaner trousers, mumsy stock-ties, sleeveless shirts in gilded lace signs of where Mr. Michele plans to lead a venerable house into future? If so, will he be doing so wearing a pair of the mink-lined mules he showed on the runway?

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