Milan Fashion Week: menswear

Burberry Prorsum, Spring/Summer '09 (scroll down to read the review)
Burberry Prorsum
In one of Burberry's strongest menswear collections for sometime, Christopher Bailey gave up the decoration and replaced it with easy colour (plenty of great greys like pewter, graphite, carbon and ink mixed with subtle neutrals like taupe, stone and sage) and texture with creases, crumples and some micro-pleating.

Everything looked loved, worn in and laundered, even the leathers. It was super-refined and studied, but the result looked effortless which is kind of how a guy wants to look anyway.

Outerwear is always important, being Burberry, but this time it was lightness that was the key. Under the coats and jackets were simple fine gauge knits, often with reversed seams that borrowed something from old woollen undergarments. Most wanted were the short unstructured trench coats, as light as shirts, in washed cotton mix, with a subtle degrade that looked like the garment had been left to fade in the sun.

Sadly Burberry did not get everything right, a tent, packed full of people and lights, with a transparent PVC roof, in Milan with temperatures in the high 30s, was a bad idea. Luckily for the company, Bailey delivered.