Are you a ’Steve’ (McQueen) or a ’Serge’ (Gainsbourg)? A ’Franz’ (Kafka) or a ’Jack’ (Kerouak)? Antonio Marras, one of Milan’s most creative fashion designers, put these questions to the audience at his latest show for the handbag house of Piquardo.
His capsule collection of multi-patched handbags, presented during Milan men’s fashion week, was certainly a new step forward but the real originality came in his inventive installation: a series of tableaux vivants where the models emulated ’great travellers’ of quintessential male-ness.
The characters posed, frozen, on stage sets within the gilded walls of Milan’s Palazzo Clerici. There was Joseph Beuys with his rucksack, perched on his latest anthropomorphic art installation; and Bob Dylan on a stage littered with marker-scrawled posters. Alberto Giacometti sat with a briefcase in his studio amid several haunting sculptures, McQueen on his bike carrying a satchel.
To elaborate without interfering with the still-life, Marras handed out an iPad with headphones to each guest, where he’d downloaded images and recordings for each vignette.
