Torqued and tweaked to perfection: Jil Sander Fall/Winter 2009

Designers for the most part have been giving the media flock nothing to write home about at the shows this season. No spectacle and no debacles, no rupture and certainly no rapture...just the solid and familiar reiteration of everything you have come to expect from the industrial machine that is Fashion 2009. It says a lot about the state of mind of fashion critics when the inadvertent tears of a 14 year old girl on a directional runway sets off a media storm. Nor is TI get on a high horse about that one. Picking up that shot from fashionologie certainly set the traffic numbers on a surge at TI this weekend. But as the fickle fashion flock starts that final migration into Paris, what was striking about Milan (as reported by the Hiss Squad ) was the reduced circumstances of it all. In the good old days, there used to be a fabulous square off between the Gucci camp and the Prada camp. Tom vs Miuccia was a proposition of anthithesis: hedonist vs intellectual theorist and little was held in common. Especially when it came to the girls. Exclusives were a battlefront and the entertainment value of that was paramount. Now Prada looms over the Milan landscape like a monolith and the dearth of competition has made for a very flat experience. And then there are the post-recession stats..with at least a dozen smaller designers choosing not to show and rates being slashed (in some cases up to half of what they used to be) Milan as a show market did not have a peak economic performance.
But then there was the upside. Maybe for the above reason the cavalier disposal of girls slowed somewhat this season, with NYC breakout faces like Jac and Karolin finding continuity in a market that usually likes to ignore whatever it is New York had wrought a few weeks earlier. TI loves this sense of consolidation because it makes forging a Top 10 Newcomer list far easier this season.
Finally a fashion lover could only feel gratitude for Raf Simons' latest Jil Sander collection which managed to look just like a collection one would expect bearing the Jil Sander name, while veering off into the odd color tones that usually fail to animate "minimalism". This time those tones worked and the torque of the shapes Simons offered presented a view point that trated clothes as an artistic expression AND as timeless, wearable classics. May this Jil Sander moment set the stores on fire.