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Benetton, Ferrari Close Milan Fashion Week with Bold Moves

A model presents a creation for Benetton's Women's Spring Summer 2023 fashion collection on September 25, 2022 as part of the Fashion Week in Milan. (AFP)
A model presents a creation for Benetton's Women's Spring Summer 2023 fashion collection on September 25, 2022 as part of the Fashion Week in Milan. (AFP)
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Benetton, Ferrari Close Milan Fashion Week with Bold Moves

A model presents a creation for Benetton's Women's Spring Summer 2023 fashion collection on September 25, 2022 as part of the Fashion Week in Milan. (AFP)
A model presents a creation for Benetton's Women's Spring Summer 2023 fashion collection on September 25, 2022 as part of the Fashion Week in Milan. (AFP)

Milan Fashion Week closed Sunday after five days of mostly womenswear previews that celebrated diversity and renewal, with more designers of color represented than ever and a host of new talent making their debuts at major fashion houses.

The Italian fashion council was also putting the spotlight on sustainability with the return of the Green Carpet awards Sunday night recognizing progress in practices that reduce waste in the industry and its carbon footprint.

Even while the fashion world was putting the spotlight on sustainability, this season’s calendar presented unsustainable trajectories between shows, forcing the fashion crowd to travel back and forth, multiple times in one day, in an already gridlocked city. Even biking proved a challenge with few bike lanes on the routes.

Some highlights from Sunday, the closing day of Milan Fashion Week:

Remaking Benetton from the knitwear up

Benetton is embarking on yet another remake, this time under the creative direction of Andrea Incontri, a Milan designer with experience at a host of fashion houses, including Tod’s.

An architect by training, Incontri wants to reshape the Benetton retail experience, and emptied the Corso Buenos Aires flagship store for his runway debut as creative director. Upstairs, his new collection -- replete with colorful fruit-repeating motifs, pretty melange knits and tweeds -- hangs against a bare tiled wall, in well-curated, easy to survey constellations.

Underlining his desire to start with the consumer, Incontri staged the runway show on the ground floor, allowing passersby to catch a glimpse.

The modern silhouette includes culottes — a hot trend in Milan for next spring and summer — and leather Obi belts that shape crisp cotton dresses or corresponding cotton shirt-short sets for men.

The brand’s famed knitwear is pretty in melange, which layers nicely. A bra top gives a modern edge to a ribbed tunic and trousers, as cozy as it is chic. Knit biker shorts transform a tweed skirt and jacket into active daywear. Fruit motifs create a cornucopia of mix-and-match looks: the reds, pinks and yellows of cherries, pears and apples all aligning cheerily with green, sky blue and yellow backgrounds.

Incontri has given the Benetton octopus logo a much-needed graphic update, deploying it sparingly, and he has created necklaces with the B and E for Benetton, in the spirit of personalization popular with Gen-Z. Just six months in the job, Incontri promises an even fuller makeover at the 57-year-old brand, which has experienced periods of malaise.

Whereas Benetton’s heydey is strongly associated with the socially forward United Colors of Benetton advertising campaigns of Oliviero Toscani, Incontro wants to put the product and the consumer first.

“This is a brand that I feel a lot of affection for, as do many Italians, because I grew up with it,” Incontri told reporters.

Ferrari apparel gaining traction

Super sportscar maker Ferrari’s foray into luxury goods is finding traction with its luxury auto buyers, as hoped, but also Formula 1 fans whose garages house less flashy cars.

Rocco Iannone, the creative director of Ferrari’s fashion line, said he saw the effect during the Monza Grand Prix event this month. Many Formula 1 fans were buying pricey made-to-measure Ferrari garments, and showing up the next day wearing them at the race track “with badges and all of the iconic elements.”

“This mix is what I am interested in telling: They exist and we want to give them a wardrobe,” Ianonne said.

Iannone’s third collection focuses on what the creative director called Ferrari’s “primordial materials:” leather, denim, cotton and silk.

The new collection combines pieces Formula 1 fans would covet, including racing jumpsuits and pit jackets adorned with patches, as well as elegant statement pieces incorporating the Ferrari technological drive with more subtlety.

Jacquard cargo pants are made with recycled nylon, rendering a camouflage look. The denim is technological, each piece treated with sprays of ozone to give a colorful stone-washed effect without the usual environmental damage. And napa glove leather is used to make supple leather jumpsuits in a deep red with orange undertones or black.

“The goal is to embrace the soul of Ferrari through a sharp, precise and mixed wardrobe,” Iannone.

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Fashion

As Fast Fashion's Waste Pollutes Africa's Environment, Designers in Ghana are Finding a Solution

Attendees at a thrift and an upcycle show pose for a photograph in Accra, Ghana, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2024. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
Attendees at a thrift and an upcycle show pose for a photograph in Accra, Ghana, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2024. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
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As Fast Fashion's Waste Pollutes Africa's Environment, Designers in Ghana are Finding a Solution

Attendees at a thrift and an upcycle show pose for a photograph in Accra, Ghana, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2024. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)
Attendees at a thrift and an upcycle show pose for a photograph in Accra, Ghana, Sunday, Oct. 27, 2024. (AP Photo/Misper Apawu)

In a sprawling secondhand clothing market in Ghana’s capital, early morning shoppers jostle as they search through piles of garments, eager to pluck a bargain or a designer find from the stalls selling used and low-quality apparel imported from the West.
At the other end of the street, an upcycled fashion and thrifting festival unfolds with glamour and glitz, The Associated Press reported. Models parade along a makeshift runway in outfits that designers created out of discarded materials from the Kantamanto market, ranging from floral blouses and denim jeans to leather bags, caps and socks.
The festival is called Obroni Wawu October, using a phrase that in the local Akan language means “dead white man’s clothes.” Organizers see the event as a small way to disrupt a destructive cycle that has made Western overconsumption into an environmental problem in Africa, where some of the worn-out clothes end up in waterways and garbage dumps.
“Instead of allowing (textile waste) to choke our gutters or beaches or landfills, I decided to use it to create something ... for us to use again,” said Richard Asante Palmer, one of the designers at the annual festival organized by the Or Foundation, a nonprofit that works at the intersection of environmental justice and fashion development.
Ghana is one of Africa's leading importers of used clothing. It also ships some of what it gets from the United Kingdom, Canada, China and elsewhere to other West African nations, the United States and the UK, according to the Ghana Used Clothing Dealers Association.
Some of the imported clothes arrive in such poor shape, however, that vendors dispose of them to make room for the next shipments. On average, 40% of the millions of garments exported weekly to Ghana end up as waste, according to Neesha-Ann Longdon, the business manager for the Or Foundation’s executive director.
The clothing dealers association, in a report published earlier this year on the socioeconomic and environmental impact of the nation’s secondhand clothing trade, cited a much lower estimate, saying only 5% of the items that reach Ghana in bulk are thrown out because they cannot be sold or reused.
In many African countries, citizens typically buy preowned clothes — as well as used cars, phones and other necessities — because they cost less than new ones. Secondhand shopping also gives them a chance to score designer goods that most people in the region can only dream of.
But neither Ghana's fast-growing population of 34 million people nor its overtaxed infrastructure is equipped to absorb the amount of cast-off attire entering the country. Mounds of textile waste litter beaches across the capital, Accra, and the lagoon which serves as the main outlet through which the city’s major drainage channels empty into the Gulf of Guinea.
“Fast fashion has taken over as the dominant mode of production, which is characterized here as higher volumes of lower-quality goods,” Longdon said.
Jonathan Abbey, a fisherman in the area, said his nets often capture textile waste from the sea. Unsold used clothes “aren’t even burned but are thrown into the Korle Lagoon, which then goes into the sea,” Abbey said.
The ease of online shopping has sped up this waste cycle, according to Andrew Brooks, a King’s College London researcher and the author of “Clothing Poverty: The Hidden World of Fast Fashion and Second-hand Clothes.”
In countries like the UK, unwanted purchases often end up as charity donations, but clothes are sometimes stolen from street donation bins and exported to places where the consumer demand is perceived to be higher, Brooks said. Authorities rarely investigate such theft because the clothes are "seen as low-value items,” he said.
Donors, meanwhile, think their castoffs are “going to be recycled rather than reused, or given away rather than sold, or sold in the UK rather than exported overseas,” Brooks said.
The volume of secondhand clothing sent to Africa has led to complaints of the continent being used as a dumping ground. In 2018, Rwanda raised tariffs on such imports in defiance of US pressure, citing concerns the West's refuse undermined efforts to strengthen the domestic textile industry. Last year, Ugandan President Yoweri Museveni said he would ban imports of clothing “from dead people.”
Trade restrictions might not go far in either reducing textile pollution or encouraging clothing production in Africa, where profits are low and incentives for designers are few, experts say.
In the absence of adequate measures to stop the pollution, organizations like the Or Foundation are trying to make a difference by rallying young people and fashion creators to find a good use for scrapped materials.
Ghana's beaches had hardly any discarded clothes on them before the country's waste management problems worsened in recent years, foundation co-founder Allison Bartella said.
“Fast forward to today, 2024, there are mountains of textile waste on the beaches,” she said.