Etro staged its presentation in the dim back rooms of a Brera trattoria, swapping white cubes for low light and a faintly Wunderkammer-ish atmosphere. The space was intimate and plush, populated by mannequins crowned with Venetian-made papier-mâché animal heads—foxes, owls, rams, bears—turning the display into a well-dressed menagerie with impeccable table manners.
Marco De Vincenzo explained that the masks nodded to Etro’s 1997 photographic campaign, devised by Kean Etro during his tenure as creative director. The idea hinged on physiognomy, the notion that human traits often mirror animal ones, and that our most refined behaviors still rest on fairly primal instincts. “I thought the imagery was genius,” he said, and so he brought it back. It felt less like an archive citation than a knowing throwback: odd, and slightly camp. The collection was called Ani-men, a portmanteau of ‘animal’ and ‘men.’
De Vincenzo cast his Ani-men in the low light of a forest at dusk, which felt like their natural habitat. Their palette ran to dense browns, velvety greens, and sensuous garnet reds, the kind of shades that suggest camouflage, or at least discretion. They drifted between velvet paisley-splashed robes and slouchy pajamas; when they suited up, they did so impeccably in slim-lapelled tailoring trimmed with feathers and matched with equally feathery waistcoats. Plumage, here, was a matter of heraldry. The sweet faces of deer peeked out in pixelated jacquards on plush knitwear. Paisley, inevitably, was everywhere, less a motif than a genetic marker, sealing the Ani-men’s lineage and pedigree.
The presentation unfolded to the hypnotic hum of Wendy Carlos’s scores, a composer De Vincenzo has long admired. “She wrote the soundtracks for A Clockwork Orange and The Shining,” he explained. “Her most famous album was an electronic rewire of Bach, and I thought: ‘she’s doing exactly what I’m doing.’ She was both celebrated and criticized for it, an inventor who reworked existing music. And that’s precisely what I’m doing at Etro: rewriting the past, reshaping it, and remixing it into some new beat.”
