Milan Fashion Week Closes on Quiet Glamour, and the Style Press Writes the Ledger

Max Mara's catwalk at Milan fashion week offered well-cut coats, sturdy block-heeled boots, crisp white shirts and capacious suede handbags, the Guardian reported, with chore jackets and loose-fit trousers nodding to the "nonconformist glamour" of Amelia Earhart and other pioneers. What the show deliberately did not have, the paper noted, was shock value.

Two days earlier, Maria Grazia Chiuri showed her Fendi collection, full of diaphanous dresses and visible bras, celebrating the Italian pop legend Raffaella Carrà as an "incredible feminist" of the 1970s, according to the Guardian. Chiuri told the paper she has been having more fun with clothes since returning from Paris to Rome, and that she has "less of a uniform these days".

Taken together, the two accounts describe a Milan season pitched at the till rather than the tabloid. That is not a small thing for a region where fashion is an industrial cluster, not a pageant: the Lombard supply chain of mills, tanneries, ateliers and logistics firms is priced on orders placed in the weeks after a show, not on the volume of the applause.