MILAN - The new normal has arrived in Milan. The American neologism ' normcore' still elicits mostly puzzled stares from Italians, but the spirit is willing even if the vocabulary is weak: bellwether designers of Italy are on a quotidian trip. According to Miuccia Prada, one of the oracles of Milan, it is not the time for crazy things.
At Fendi, Silvia Venturini Fendi was extolling the virtues of 'real clothes.' She is a designer who has, in the past, taken Fendi men's wear to the edge of sci-fi oddity. No longer. The men's collection is growing - 'faster than we expected,' admitted Pietro Beccari, its chief executive - so commerce may have tugged the design back from the brink. But it might just as well be that abnormal times require normal measures. 'The clothes are the everyday basics that must be in every man's closet,' Ms. Fendi said. 'I was working a lot on jeans and chinos, which are the base of the collection.'
But basic isn't always basic. She flipped up the hinged lenses of a pair of sunglasses perched on a model's nose to demonstrate. 'To see reality in a different perspective is useful,' she said.
Hers is: The world glimpsed through a Fendi lens. So her jeans weren't mere jeans. They were marbled, faux-stonewashed facsimiles in leather and shearling, or lighter versions in cotton and silk jacquard. Her shower-slide sandals only looked like rubber; they were rubberized leather.
Throughout, there were moments of Fendi's former extremity, such as the leather-mesh vests that overlaid suits like perforated armor or the slightly kinky way that bags slung across the front of the body revealed straps held together at the back with a silver harness-style ring. But the key men's accessory circa 2014 doesn't truss, it plugs. So Ms. Fendi partnered with Beats by Dr. Dre to create headphones in crocodile and its selleria, or saddle, leather.
At Etro, too, things were not as they seemed. Kean Etro titled the collection 'We Are What We Eat,' and at least at first glance, the truth of that seemed to rest on the surface. The clothes were printed - to eye-popping and not wholly flattering effect - with images of pasta, shrimp and clams. The press notes cast a glance at Giuseppe Arcimboldo, the 16th-century portraitist-in-foods. But the future, too, holds groaning tables. In 2015, a world exposition opens in Milan, with its focus on food and sustainability.
If the new normal requires just that type of concern, Mr. Etro obliged by offering pieces from what he called a 'biodiversity' of fibers: Not only cotton, whose production he lamented was often not sustainable, but bananas, milk, nettles and hemp. (Most of the results had a textured, slightly coarse feel, not dissimilar to linen.) They became the tailored jackets of the opening looks.
This being Etro, there were many suits and sportcoats, on the whole longer and looser than in the recent past. But there also were gym shorts, sweatpants and track suits in nearly equal measure.
It made a change from last season's love letter of a show to Etro's tailors, whom Mr. Etro sent down the runway in January. But he noted that these same tailors work on his sportswear, and that long experience with him had prepared them for such swerves.
A reporter who had just seen spaghetti-vongole sweats wondered if it was still possible to shock these hardy artisans. 'Only when I cook,' Mr. Etro replied.
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