MILAN — For a moment at the beginning of Bottega Veneta show on Sunday morning a baffled spectator got the impression Giorgio Armani had taken over Tomas Maier’s brain. The first grouping of Mr. Maier’s slouchy knee-length pull-on pants was right out of the Italian master’s playbook. All you needed to complete the impression was an Armani beret.
Then the show corrected course and Mr. Maier established again why he has been so successful designing for a house whose customer turns left by reflex when boarding a plane.
If it were your lucky lot to live the life of a billionaire beach bum or a trust fund version of the dancers Mr. Maier claimed as his inspiration, you could do a lot worse than to dress in the offerings the designer showed in an austere space on the outskirts of Milan. There were wispy summer softball T-shirts with deep sexy scoop necks; trousers with both waists and cuffs rolled; shorts so wide they looked like bloomers; long-john style pants; cotton pullovers woven in transistor-panel patterns; and sweaters almost one-shouldered, the necklines were so casual.
In less assured hands, the whole thing could have gone badly wrong — “Chorus Line” meets “Gilligan’s Island.” Instead the collection achieved a fine coherence despite its obvious contradictions.
In a fair and just world, of course, the dance rats once sees making their toed-out way around the Lincoln Center plaza would be able to afford Bottega Veneta. In the real world, this stuff is strictly for the rich. There’s satisfaction to be had, all the same, in knowing that, however expensively attired, few hedge-funders will ever attain the grace of carriage that is a dancer’s wealth.
There was something else Mr. Maier did with his show beyond putting on a master class in understatement. He set the tone for a week of theme-and-variations here in Milan. In the flaccid terminology of both baseball and corporate America, designers generally stayed within their wheelhouses. Familiar ideas were unearthed, revisited and shined up.
At Salvatore Ferragamo, that meant the creative director Massimiliano Giornetti — a deeply courteous man who writes Christmas cards and thank-you notes in an elegantly spidery hand — stayed with a range familiar to him and this house: soberly polished urbanity. Don’t blame Mr. Giornetti if the results were probably too polite for their own good. That’s just who he is.
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