At the beginning of this season, Luca Magliano asked his staff members to bring in photo albums of their families, as a way to think about their own collective pasts. What emerged was a feeling for the 1970s, when many of the pictures dated back to. “It was important to reference that kind of elegance,” Magliano said, before he presented his spring 2027 line at the famed club and restaurant Maxim’s. “Also, the patina, the patina of an old picture, of memory.”
Off that seed of inspiration, Magliano added a touch of Y2K to disrupt anything too straightforward. “We look at classic menswear, but from a queer perspective and a sense of irony,” he said. “We say that it’s a place where rage and nostalgia meet.”
That ’70s flavor came through in kitschy floral-print compact knits in purple and brown, and in a plaid cotton suit jacket with an oversized, borrowed-from-dad fit. A collaboration with the tracksuit brand Diadora added to it, as did another partnership with the sunglasses brand Carrera. Magliano also wanted to create pieces that had the “styling” built in—so a pale pink polo had a second collar (very early aughts) and one suit jacket had the sleeves chopped short and a shirt layered underneath, giving the impression they were rolled up. A foulard sarong and a pair of pleated, rolled pants, meanwhile, came with a waistline of twisted leather belts.
In addition to Magliano’s irony, there’s often an element of the twisted and perverse in his work—here it came in the embrace of a sleazy, lounge lizard quality. See: a cheetah print top and matching pair of jeans, where the design seemed to be falling away, or an ill-fitting four-button suit coat that had a thrifted, Margiela quality. And yet to balance it out, there were moments of unexpected sophistication, as with a draped top in wide brown stripes with a plaid draped overlay or a high-neck, tweaked sweater worn with straight-cut trousers. At Maxim’s, the clothes were given a slightly unhinged, debaucherous quality when they were worn by oddball models who smoked and gossiped at a disheveled dinner table. It was at turns fascinating and off-putting, and quintessentially Magliano.
