It was all about complex and unique textile-play at Marco de Vincezo in Milan.

Mosaics of Contradiction

Marco de Vincenzo’s show notes set out the conceptual backdrop for his fragmentary feast of cut and fabric: “his mosaic defies any possible definition, and together these elements are new, peculiar and coherent”. Even the words are purposefully contradictory, suggesting a kind of unity in disunity and a strange cohesion in the disparate. But what about the clothes? Well they were as varied as promised…

Painterly Ribbon

Things kicked off with a coat formed from innumerable strips of ribboned fabric that gradated like a blurred canvas down from black into canary yellow at the bottom – though gradated might be the wrong term here given that the colour-clashes were sudden and purposefully surprising. Then there was a shirt adorned with a super-vivid, Japanese-inspired mountain print followed by a dress that was all delicate-and-dainty floral beneath and then became toughly-underwired as it reached the bust. Contradictions and juxtapositions: everything de Vincenzo promised in his notes.

Rising Suns and Ruffled Textures

The Orientalism bubbled up again towards the end of the show in the form of more metallica with kimono-esque sleeves. Those ribboned pieces returned too, as, for example, a full length black dress that did, I must admit, feel a little shaggy-dog. All in all, it was plenty of the extreme fabric-innovation that we’ve come to expect from de Vincenzo, which meant a whole lot of surface play and experimentation that was as sublimely indefinable as the designer intended.

Words: Benji Walters