“So Milan, huh? What’s that like?” a friend of mine, who works as an attorney in Washington D.C., asked me in an email the other day. During fashion month, she often checks in to get my take on what the shows are really like. Honestly, Milan feels a bit like a bubble that has been untouched by the recession (even though the Milanese complain about “the crisis,” I don’t believe them when I see shoppers walking down Via Sant’Andrea with massive Burberry, Marni and Prada shopping bags dangling from their hands.) And compared to the other major fashion cities, Milan feels a lot more “grown up.” While looking at Tamu’s street style photographs over these past few weeks, I’ve even noticed that the editors who cover all four fashion cities tend to dress up more here, working the pencil skirts, romantic dresses, dramatic shoulders and sky-high heels. In New York earlier this month, the fashion show gang looked urbane and cool in an unaffected kind of way, while London’s crowd looked full-on punk rock in that typical bugged-out British style. Paris is usually where people pull out all the stops and dress with the most creativity (the city is the fashion calendar’s unspoken main event, after all). But in Milan, the look is all polished sophistication. Even the show-goers wearing the most edgy, avant garde designers are doing so in a way that’s decidedly more elegant.
-photos by Tamu McPherson, All the Pretty Birds
