Mid-Seventies. Harold and Maude, the movie directed by Hal Ashby and selected by the National Film Preservation Board, this year turns 50. Ashby directed other memorable movies, like Coming Home and Being There, but the success he achieved in his golden period was barely useful: Ashby became addicted to drugs and died for cancer refusing any kind of traditional medical care. An announced suicide, like the one committed by Maude, the main female character of a movie (with a stunning soundtrack by Cat Stevens) almost forgotten, but that reached the sensibility of the new generations in the 70s. The costumes, very accurate, anticipated a style adopted in the mid-Seventies that persists, sometimes in a very precise way and sometimes reinterpreted, in today’s fashion.

The last uniform. Fashion inspired by military uniforms is a trend surviving through years, especially in menswear. At first designers took from them just the details, like the insignias that Gianfranco Ferré put on coats’ shoulders; later, in the 90s, Prada, Costume National Homme, Jil Sander and Dolce&Gabbana made entire collections based on charm and sensuality of this inspiration using simple and rough fabrics. Then, the fabrics became softer and dyed in blue, beige, even red, neglecting the original color, military green, indeed. Today is a trend that recalls the rock movements of the 70s, far away from the citation of Kubrick’s Full Metal Jacket. Just look at the jacket designed by Kim Jones for Dior Homme photographed by Letizia Ragno for Style Magazine.

We dressed the American style. Today at the Metropolitan Museum in New York opens the first part of the exhibition In America: A Lexicon of Fashion; the second one – An Anthology of Fashion – is going to open in May 2022. In terms of self-celebration the Americans are champions; just like the French. Lucky them. But in terms of fashion, luxury brands are rare exceptions. On the other hand they’re brilliant communicators, brave and skilled in marketing, but not always able to leave the mark with memorable collections. “American fashion” is, indeed, more referred to an idea of style and talks about a self-referential culture, everything but inclusive. “American fashion” is Brooke Shields in Calvin Klein denim, Ralph Lauren’s Hamptons, the Studio 54 star system celebrated by Halston. It’s a mood. Not by chance the ambassador of fashion worldwide has been an Italian, Franca Sozzani. Anna Wintour has never been able to bring Italian and French designers on New York catwalks, like she’d like to (for years).

Other subversive. The cover of Style Magazine shows a kind of aesthetics we’re not used to anymore. The politically correct idea of beauty diffused nowadays has been and will be essential to convey an inclusive signal even from who, for example the fashion press, privileged a single idea of image in the past. But if we have to be inclusive, let’s include also the classic beauty (that we don’t dislike at all). On the cover, the 80s reference is pretty clear; the photographic technique, the casting, the grooming and the styling remind us the era of the beautiful and unattainable. While the clothes, by Alessandro Sartori for Ermenegildo Zegna XXX, are the combination of the contaminations and a creative path that, in the last years, have overturned the codes of conformism and tradition of a historic brand looking for contemporaneity.

Let’s be athletes. The Olympic games ate about to start. We’re going to watch some sport, I hope so, and maybe, in this precise moment, we don’t care much about the style adopted by sportsmen and sportswomen. We care about the attitude they (an we) will have to approach these Olympics one year later. We hope we’ll breathe a sigh of relief and focus our energies on the passions and emotions that the pandemic has stolen from us. Concerning my “style advice”, let the pictures talk. And may the best one win.