Milan Fashion Week opens with Federico Cina

The men’s fashion season in Milan opened on Friday with Federico Cina and a real happening inside the Fondazione Sozzani, in the northern district of the Italian fashion capital.

Held on a cold but sunny winter afternoon, the presentation looked more like a Marina Abramović art installation than a clothing display.

It was an ideal setting for the collection, made in dense, almost industrial wools and confidently cut by Cina, a Bologna-born creative.

Models performing mini daily rituals inside plywood boxes or small stages give the clothes a certain elegant gravitas.

A male rocker, dressed in a perfectly tailored midnight blue blazer/peacoat, stood in the middle of a circle of eight microphones, occasionally sliding toward one of them to utter a single solemn word.

A shaggy young man in a white denim jumpsuit sat in the corner peeling a hundred white-painted oranges. Not far away, a careerist in a backless, pleated handkerchief dress walked endlessly around an office chair inside a white skirt. In a way, she’s trapped as an extra in Orson Welles’ film “The Trial”; on the other, she is a proud woman who does her job with precision and pride.

Federico named his collection “Assunta and Giacomo”, after his two grandparents who died last year.

“It is a fashion souvenir, which recalls the way they dressed for work, special occasions or family events,” explains Federico Cina.

A collection of great elegance and an intelligent introduction to the Fondazione Sozzani, which continues to develop and whose founder Carla and her daughter Sara Maino, the best scout of young fashion talents in Europe, are in the process of transforming a former ceramics factory into a trendy cultural magnet.

Dozens of young, trendy people crowded around the event. Once the economic and industrial heart of Italy’s post-war renaissance, Milan is today the new El Dorado of design innovation. European youth arrive in droves to discover themselves and offer a new vision of their roots.

Like Federico Cina.