The models were dancing. Again.
Here, during the first full weekend of the men’s fall shows, a noticeable number of fashion houses had decided that merely showing off their new clothes wasn’t enough. No, no, the audience should be given a performance right out of Alvin Ailey. Runway shows are out. Free Jazz dance recitals are in.
At Brioni on Saturday, the designer Norbert Stumpfl paused a walk-through of his collection of one-percenter signifiers (croc-skin coats, vicuña jackets, cashmere sweaters looped devil-may-care style over jackets) to allow me to take in the gyrational stylings of a dancer. For a few minutes, a man wiggled and pliéd across a red carpet. He swished his coat about like a matador with a cape, as if to say: “Look ma! No lining!”
Hours later, at a presentation at Corneliani, more dancers skittered along a rotating platform, doing some pseudo-break dancing in marbled gray sweaters and slate suits. They paused between slides to hug it out.
“I think male dancers are very emotional,” said Stefano Gaudioso Tramonte, the label’s style director.
Beyond providing some Instagrammable drama, the performance, which was choreographed by Kate Coyne, the artistic director of the Central School of Ballet in London, expressed that the label’s pressed trousers and flat suits weren’t as restrictive as they seemed.
“All the fabrics are very rigorous,” Mr. Guadioso Tramonte said, “but we wanted to show that they’re quite fluid also.”
The fledgling label Mordecai didn’t need a dance routine to demonstrate that its clothes were fluid — that was pretty evident from the slouchy way its Abominable Snowman parkas and slack, striped trousers hung on the models at its presentation on Saturday afternoon. Still, Ludovico Bruno, the label’s founder and designer, had the static models come to life, bending and stomping like monks listening to Kraftwerk.
“It’s not a dancing class, it’s more like a wave,” Mr. Bruno said.
Movement has long been a part of fashion presentations. In the 1990s, models would sashay down the catwalk, surviving with verve. (Watch “Unzipped,” the mighty fashion documentary about Isaac Mizrahi, for some footage of that.) To this day, brands like Issey Miyake employ dance troops to jitter down the runway, highlighting the pliability of their clothes.
That dancing has become such a common motif in Milan speaks to the nature of the brands that operate here. Many are traditionalists whose collections barely budge from season to season. To unkind eyes, dance routines distract the audience from this fact. A kinder take, of course, would be that the routines show the elegance and grace of the clothes.
There is also, of course, the social media of it all: Every performance I witnessed this weekend was captured by the iPhone-holding throngs in the audience. I could watch them all later on Instagram. How’s that for savvy free marketing?
Labels like Mordecai represent the other, though comparatively tiny, faction in Milan: younger companies that are, perhaps, not yet confident enough for the runway but not resigned to the static “oh, whatever” feel of a showroom, which, to the uninitiated, looks like a well-stocked retail store.
They should take that leap to the runway, instead of half-measuring with some choreography. Their audiences at fashion week, after all, are better suited to judge a topcoat than a two-step.