MILAN — One of the commonest sights outside fashion shows, in whatever city they’re held, is hordes of shutterbugs racing to snap pictures of what is loosely described as “street fashion.” Often the photographers form a phalanx, a kind of flying wedge, and back shoulder to shoulder into traffic snapping away as their quarry advances. They’re like crazy birders. Watch them long enough, though, or track their Instagram accounts and you will soon observe that they’re tracking just one kind of bird: the fashion cuckoo.
There is that Japanese personage seen at so many shows dressed in plus-fours, or short shorts and wearing a platinum blonde wig reminiscent of Joey Heatherton (Google her: worth a look.) There is the guy who routinely pulls off the full Henry Higgins, with a cape, gloves of mustard leather, even a pipe. There’s the charming, and shrewd, style writer for a major Italian daily who turned up everywhere throughout the past wintry week here shod in fake-fur (or pelle ecologica, to use the hilarious Italian term) sandals from Ainea.
Spend any time among these ambulating punch lines — characters that seem to have swapped immersion in daily life for the nebulous reality of the web — and you start hankering for a little pre-Kardashian-era propriety.
Miuccia Prada expressed something like that feeling in an exceptionally fine show on Sunday, one that came accompanied by a written manifesto. The message she had in mind had to do with the reality that “gender is context and context is often gendered.”
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If, as was strenuously asserted by a Gucci spokesman, the runway show on Monday bore no imprint of the ousted Frida Giannini and was assembled by the head accessories designer Alessandro Michele and a workroom team in under a week, it may not be fair to judge this collection as anything other than a placeholder between old and new.
But with the news on Wednesday that the little-known Mr. Michele had been named creative director of both men’s and women’s wear, a collection created on a cliffhanger deadline took on a different significance.
The hearty ovation greeting the team members when they all came onto the runway for a postshow bow better reflected admiration for effort than praise for a collection that leaned far too heavily on androgyny tropes no one has had much success with at Gucci since Tom Ford. Were the boys-will-be-girls-will-be-boys casting, the overfamiliar gender blur, the crepe and chiffon and pipe-cleaner trousers, mumsy stock-ties, sleeveless shirts in gilded lace signs of where Mr. Michele plans to lead a venerable house into future? If so, will he be doing so wearing a pair of the mink-lined mules he showed on the runway?
A version of this article appears in print on January 22, 2015, in The International New York Times. Order Reprints| Today’s Paper|Subscribe
