MM6 staged its spring show on a narrow street, just steps from the newly renovated Milan flagship store on Via della Spiga. The runway was the freshly white-painted sidewalk; models walked in seemingly offhand looks, wearing pieces styled with an imagination that felt both spontaneous and pragmatic. “Dream and reality, beauty and grit,” summed up a brand spokesperson.
On the backstage moodboard hung Italian artist Lisetta Carmi’s photographs of trans communities in the ’60s, paired with images of Naples’s Spanish Quarters from the same era—black-and-white snapshots of raw, unvarnished humanity. But the references weren’t about nostalgia. The MM6 design team is far too cool for that, and besides, these custodians of the Margelian flame have never subscribed to such sentimentality. “It’s about a sense of community that speaks to our sensibility,” they explained. “It’s not just the ’60s, not just women or men, or gender in general. It’s about being together, living this life side by side—we can be from different planets and still find these shared moments. And grit and beauty, they always go together.”
As a nod to the inauguration of the revamped flagship, garment bags were reborn as capes, and hanger silhouettes appeared as transparent shoulder inserts on a trenchcoat or on long sweaters that cleverly doubled as minidresses. The shoulders of oversized tailored jackets jutted forward, evoking the stiff posture of clothes still hanging on a rack. A coat worn over a matching dress became a makeshift twinset.
The classics were all there—the mac, the pantsuit, the blouson, the shirt, the trousers—but gleefully scrambled the ironic Margiela way. Jeans borrowed the cut and polish of tailored pants, while tailored trousers masqueraded as denim. End-of-roll labels dangled, raw hems frayed, and an archival geometric-floral print burst back to life in bright hues. And why those jolts of colors punctuating the collection? Acid yellows and fuchsias and turquoises? “Life isn’t all happy and poppy and swinging now, so we wanted to keep a little bit of hope,” they explained. “The world is going mental. If we lose hope, we lose it all.”