Following January’s blessedly straightforward reset, at which the centrally located runway featured The Killers and a not-killer but okay collection, Munich’s most famous Ferrari-favoring mountain-buying no longer an enfant but eternally terrible Swiss-based (for tax reasons) fashion iconoclast had apparently got the message. This was another show full of bombast and performance, but it zinged along promptly. Unless the looming lightning on the horizon ended things early, it looked like the after-party that was shaping up when we left was going to be fun (for those in the mood). The crowd that was apparently watching from the balcony of the Fondazione Prada alongside were probably not in that mood.
Part of Plein’s shtick has always been that he is here to storm the ivory towers—such as that Fondazione—of fashion. Tonight he sounded like the grizzliest gatekeeper of them all as he spoke at impassioned length of the dangers of over-discounting—something that certain shareholder driven online wholesale retailers (naming no names) favor to boost short-term revenue results—in affecting the overall perception of a brand. He was passingly scurrilous, on purpose of course, about labels that are not his own.
Another subject we got into was his reported efforts to acquire the Roberto Cavalli brand. These turn out to be true, and were the subject, he said, of four months’ focus, but have, for reasons too niche and potentially litigious to go into here, been apparently aborted. Which leads, at last, to the collection. Once you looked beyond the crowd-pleasing Mad Max: Fury Road cosplay and the cool-looking band (named The Entire Universe) with a Plein-flavored Stevie Nicks-alike (from a distance) on the back of a flatbed (their attire gave me weird Plein-does-Slimane vibes), the clothes that unfolded around the cacophony of background noise represented a development. Plein has shifted his focus from hip hop, his first love, to rock. There was clearly a deal struck with Kiss, whose angled logo featured on boob- and butt-covering patches on sheer minidresses for women and a plethora of biker jackets for men.
