So I’m back from Milan with lots to share. Overall, travelling to Milan Fashion Week, i.e. my first real international Fashion Week, was an eye-opening experience mostly in a positive way. Seeing so many impecabbly dressed women who are hardcore fashion fans is not something you get to see everyday, particularly not here where I live. Therefore, experiencing that in person was so incredibly inspiring.
Living in a small city plus the routine can really blind you at some point and make you stagnate in your work, so acquiring so many experiences during this huge event of the fashion industry provided me with lots of insight and offered me different perspectives of what I would like to accomplish. I guess traveling all in all does this for us human beings and it’s probably one of the main reasons why seeing and experiencing different countries, cultures, and places is such an important thing for intellectual growth.
I confess I had been flirting with the idea of travelling to one of the 4 main Fashion Weeks for quite a long time, though I never got around to do it. At the end, I opted for Milan Fashion Week, not only because it is the closest geographically, but also because I realize a big part of my favorite designers always present their collections there (Jil Sander, Sportmax, Marni, MSGM, No. 21, etc.). Let’s not even get started about me always dreaming of going to Milan and I assure you it is one of the most beautiful cities I’ve ever been to, which, in my opinion, is not less beautiful than Florence overall. OK, Venice might be pushing it, but Renaissance architecture crib aside (oh dear, Cattedrale di Santa Maria del Fiore in Florence *sigh*), I think Milan is amazingly beautiful in its own right.
Despite the lack of time and energy after running from one event to the other, I managed to do a bit of siteseeing which you can see below in this post. Being in front of the Duomo di Milano, aka one of the most beautiful Cathedrals in the world, plus seeing the amazing Galleria Vittorio Emanuele II is enough alone to go to Milan.
Since I wasn’t 100% sure of going to Milan Fashion Week until 4 days before the shows, I was surprised that I got at the end much more invitations to shows, presentations, and parties than I expected (thank you, Erica!). I had the pleasure to see rising minimal luxe designers such as Krizia and Gabriele Colangelo (who I happen to love for a while now) as well as Trussardi, Bally, and I also got to visit the Jimmy Choo showroom besides running around to the main shows. Carine Roitfeld and Christine Centenera walked just right in front of me while I was outside the Bottega Venetta show and let me tell you they are every bit as stylish and iconic as they look like in pictures on Vogue or Pinterest. I also saw the Italian Fashion Pack many times as well as Chiara Ferragni, Anna dello Russo, Erica Pelosini and many other well-known figures in the fashion blogging world.
However, I must confess that the most inspiring outfits I saw were not featured on Vogue, Harper’s Bazaar, etc, where you mostly find only the same people and outfits over and over again. In fact, for most of the part (there are several exceptions!), they were the least inspiring if not quite the opposite. The most beautiful, interesting, and creative outfits I saw were worn by many different people on the streets I spotted not only on their way in or out of shows, but also just people on the street (Milanese people are incredibly elegant and I never saw all this ‘maximalism’ and ‘clash of prints’ streetstyle the main online fashion publications claim Milan style is all about). I guess that’s the negative side of the whole Milan Fashion Week experience: the nepotism in the fashion industry.
I also had the pleasure of meeting several lovely people whilst in Milan, but my highlight was meeting a blogger friend I’ve had for years. We spoke nonstop for hours since the second she arrived to the table. I knew she was amazing and that we had a lot in common, but meeting her surpassed any picture I had imagined in my mind of what it would be like to have a conversation with her, which is such a rare, yet amazing thing.
So, there you go. Scroll down to see my impressions of Milan Fashion Week, of the shows and presentations I attended, and of where I stayed at and ate at.
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