The return of surrealism on the catwalk Balloons, golden horns, illusionistic clothes - never as today fashion likes to dream

During the last fashion month, a different approach to design made its way on the latest catwalks, made of vivid colors and distorted lines, of an aesthetic closer to art than to clothing in the strict sense and for this reason difficult to wear, but able to catalyze all the attention on itself. At Hermès the models passed through de Chirico-style colonnades clutching lopsided Kelly Bags, VTMNTS revived Magritte's clouds printed on double-breasted dresses and following a trail already explored by Virgil Abloh at Louis Vuitton, Glenn Martens for Y/Project paid homage to the Gaultier of 1996 by superimposing silhouettes of female and male bodies in an optical illusion of naked bodies in motion, at Louis Vuitton the models had wings that looked like something out of a Bosch painting while Chanel's runway was a veritable mise en abime, a show within a show where the audience looked at tweed coats sitting on tweed stools clutching tweed invitations. While the pandemic trends of loungewear and uniform dressing still monopolize the fashion shows, making the encounter between fashion and everyday life more accessible than ever, in an exercise of escapism some designers wanted to catapult us into the realm of their imagination, but some of them stood out for a dreamy and dreamy interpretation of the latest collections: it is the neo-surrealism of Jonathan Anderson at Loewe and JW Anderson and Daniel Rosenberry at Schiapparelli.

Today, however, surrealism has taken on a dual function: on the one hand, it is escapist and serves as a reaction to an increasingly convoluted and problematic world, in which previous categories of thought are subverted and, above all, in which tradition has been explored far and wide, opening the way to new attempts at expression and innovation; on the other, it reacts to the chaos of the world by reflecting and reworking it. Surreal clothes for surreal times one might say, capable of becoming the mirror of the chaos we perceive in the world, a response to the normality of convention but also as a result of the "collapse of meaning" in which a cap can be a bag, a pair of heels can include the hem of a pair of pants. And if in the post-Covid fashion scenario brands are asked to be more and more active on political and social issues, the response of designers like Jonathan Anderson and Daniel Rosenberry has been to sublimate the anxieties of the present in a liberating creative exercise that equates fashion with art.