Is Boss the best-cast show in fashion? It’s certainly ironic that a label known for defining conventional corporate uniform in the past is, at present, absolutely avant-garde when it comes to unconventionally diverse casting. Even better, that diversity in size, color and age isn’t performative or tokenistic: instead it’s the unintentional by-product of pure, cold, marketing insight. An internal Boss strategy named Claim 5 has for several years determined that designer Marco Falcioni’s runways should contain a baseline mix of top-tier professional models alongside sportspeople, social stars, musicians, and a kaleidoscope of other eyeball-attracting cultural protagonists, all of whose criteria for inclusion has nothing to do with size and everything to do with reach and relatability.
Today, following that brief, casting director Piergiorgio Del Moro delivered a pro-am cast that wandered through a springtime savannah set by Villa Eugenie. Falcioni has been mining and redefining the Boss’s 1980s and ’90s corp-core heritage for a few seasons now. The spring collection was entitled Out Of Office and took its inspiration from elements including a Peter Lindebergh fall 2003 Hugo by Hugo Boss image featuring a casually draped pant and looped belt in an otherwise all-formal tailored look and old shots of John F. Kennedy Jr. wearing full-look Boss with total insouciance. “I was asking myself how we adapt the look and feeling away from the idea of nine-to-five,” said Falcioni.
His answer was to soften the tailoring (especially the shoulders), shift the color palette towards earthy browns and greens, crop tailored pants into roomy capris, and substitute brogues in favor of babouches. Men’s suits were cut sack-style, three-button single vent, but with those unstructured shoulders and in fabrics including raw silks, wool and garment-dyed linen. Low-slung drawstrings were integrated into pants to create a sporty gather from quads to glutes. The casting story took in a quartet of professional menswear guys; George Cortina, Ben Cobb (who styled the show), Alex Badia and Luke Day. These inveterate directional dressers all looked eminently believable in Falcioni’s gardening leave wardrobe.
Womenswear saw Falcioni erode and soften the architecture of the double-breasted blazer into wrap-blazers, coats and dresses. Blousons in wools and cottons were contoured by darting applied to affect freedom of movement rather than tailor the silhouette. Shawl collar tuxedo jackets were adapted into silk robes and robe jackets. That slimline sack suit shape was adapted and layered over cropped pants and shorts. Models toted soft briefcases and satchels that hung unzipped from their shoulders: out of them spilled ties, car-keys, capped pens and the occasional yoga mat.
This was a collection that you could easily see WFH’ers being ordered back into the physical workplace freely signing up for. Falcioni this morning gently and therapeutically stretched Boss’s recent office-based identity towards a more balanced work-life wardrobe space, one that encompassed evenings, weekends, and days in nature.
