Fabrics, craftsmanship centre-stage in Milan with Neil Barrett, Federico Cina, Simon Cracker, Pronounce

This week-end, the Milan menswear fashion week for the Fall/Winter 2024-25 season showcased artisanal Italian craftsmanship and the passion shared by many designers for fabric innovation, evident in the collections by the likes of Neil Barrett and Simone Botte of Simon Cracker, as well as emerging labels like Federico Cina and Pronounce.

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Neil Barrett effortlessly blended the purest British fashion heritage with contemporary Italian tailoring. The result was an attractive, well thought-out men’s wardrobe featuring items that were simple but never commonplace, wonderfully tailored in fine wool and high-tech tweed. The British designer, who has been based in Italy for over 30 years, has smartly refreshed the understated, functional minimalism that made his label a hit in the 1990s.
 
He re-engineered menswear’s essential staples, subtly modifying them by breathing fresh zest into them. He notably shifted to the front of some garments elements that are usually relegated to the sides or the back. For example the generous twin pockets attached to the front of a pair of jeans, ideal for slipping one’s hands into them and totally redefining the attitude.

Barrett also slightly rotated the sleeves in some of the jackets, making the rows of cuff buttons visible at the front, and did the same with elbow patches, slotting them slightly further down the forearms in an original twist. The back pleat in some shirts found its way to the front, adding a ruffle effect, while Barrett used plush and reversible fabrics to elevate some workwear items.  Cardigans came in leather and felt.
 
“I used fabrics that give direction to the garments, as well as softness and some fullness. These are hybrid looks, enabling me to create a new attitude, simultaneously country casual and urban-formal, a sort of modern streetwear, for example in the sport jacket made with tweed, polyester and polyamide, with slightly puffed-up volumes,” Barrett told FashionNetwork.com backstage.
 
“Modernity meets tradition, as though a young man had re-discovered his grandfather’s wardrobe, and combined the clothes with his own. It’s not a case of nostalgia, but rather respect for traditional codes,” he added. Barrett used a pea jacket’s diagonal side-pockets to add a new twist to a classic, square-pocket loden coat, a beige cashmere overcoat and a leather jacket. He applied straps typical of hunting trousers to enhance the cuffs of his leather gloves. And he replaced the leather clasps of a duffel coat’s toggles with large padded nylon clasps, refreshing this menswear classic.
 

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Federico Cina has gone for a complete reset this season, embarking on a similar kind of in-depth fabric research. “We have worked with very high-quality fabrics, especially recycled wool, thick cashmere yarn blended with nylon, to achieve a rounded but ultra-light feel, and also alpaca and raw materials like hemp,” said the Italian designer, who cached his models behind a large off-white screen at the centre of the stage.
 
“I wanted to clean everything up, to simplify, to eliminate redundancies. I asked myself how I could illustrate the changing stages of life, and I thought about mist, within which silhouettes gradually emerge, becoming clearer and clearer,” he added.
 
Cina, an LVMH Prize semi-finalist in 2021, excels in all varieties of knitwear. He chose rib-knit wool for matching pale green longline overcoat and trousers, and a cosy pastel-pink skirt suit. Thick-knit sweaters featured a large zipped collar sticking out over the jacket or overcoat. Ultra-fine, sheer skintight knitwear alternated with cardigans with an embossed 3D texture. And he used brushed wool to produce sets in colour gradations veering from black to blue.
 
The rest of the collection consisted of monochrome looks, most of them with unusually constructed tailored items, like the asymmetric jackets fastened laterally by means of detachable stud buttons on the collar. Another novelty was the tortellino handbag, replicating the shape of the stuffed pasta typical of Cina’s native Romagna. Federico Cina is distributed by the MDC showroom, and is available at some 30 multibrand retailers, of which 45% outside Italy – in Asia, elsewhere in Europe and the USA.

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Textures and colours were equally centre-stage in the collection by Simon Cracker. This season, the label jettisoned its neo-punk aesthetic to tread a quieter path, with a soft-spoken collection whose theme was sleep. “It’s time for calm and reflection. Rather than staging our habitual subversive show, we’re protesting silently, sidelining our punkish style to create a fresh new mood,” said backstage Simone Botte, who founded the label in 2010. From the beginning, he went for 100% upcycled fashion, and after the pandemic he was joined by Filippo Biraghi as brand coordinator.
 
Botte recycles everything, all sorts of unsold inventory and dormant stock, including threads and shoes. He deconstructs jackets and other garments, then re-assembles them after his own fashion, creating new silhouettes with raw edges, and patchwork compositions featuring detachable fabric strips held together with safety pins. “We stitched together the components, then dyed them with a coloured powder sourced from India, so that each garment has a unique colour,” he said. The collection, with its palette of bleached pink, peach, orange, green and purple hues, has a soft, faded feel.

The idea was to create a nocturnal atmosphere, like the pearls that create the impression of frost on jackets and coats reminiscent of an icy night. Or the radiance of a full moon at night, the starry sky rendered with a shower of glittering stardust scattered haphazardly across the garments. While the moon’s luminous glow was reproduced by means of brooches and oversize necklaces set with large white pearls.
 
For the printed patterns on the collection’s denim and velvet items, Simon Cracker tapped British fabric and fashion designer Sue Clowes, renowned for the collection launched by Boy George in 1981. After the pandemic, Simon Cracker has had to rebuild a sizeable part of its retail network. It is now backed by the Garage showroom, and is distributed via some 15 multibrand clients.

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Luxury fabrics and top-notch craftsmanship are the distinctive traits of Pronounce, an Italian-Chinese label founded in 2016 by Yushan Li, 35, and Jun Zhou, 33. Based between Milan and Shanghai and a regular at London Fashion Week, Pronounce showed for the first time in Milan on Sunday, presenting a sophisticated collection.
 
The label is distributed via 25 multibrand retailers worldwide. The collection featured an array of classic Chinese outfits, like uniforms and the typical long tunics, reinterpreted with a contemporary couture perspective. The designer duo was inspired by the flight of the butterfly for next winter, decorating the clothes with swirls, arabesques and whirlwind motifs using silk and satin ribbons, leather strips, and strings, applied on longline coats, suits and cosy sweaters. The result was highly geometric, with large textured passementerie effects.