Giuseppe Di Morabito hung his Resort 2027 on a line from the French critic and philosopher Roland Barthes: “I am not contradictory. I am dispersed.” He had been reading A Lover’s Discourse, and took the collection’s title–“The Parts We Keep”–from the book’s subject: What survives a relationship once it’s over. The parts he kept, he kept back. Not one face went uncovered. A brown suede scarf knotted low, covering the hair; a pinstripe blazer whose lapel rose into a hood; an ostrich-feather hat pulled to the nose; a black nappa mask blindfolded with roses. Where the styling let up, shield sunglasses took over. Di Morabito has worked with veils and coverings many times, but here they became the whole thesis. He shows, he said, but doesn’t need to show everything: “I keep a part for myself.”
The clothes ran on that reserve. A jacket carried its structure hidden under and over the lace at once, set all the way around with no seam to release it. Corsetry came bonded into the garments rather than worn beneath them. A trench trailed its fringing on the bottom, almost hidden rather than shown. Silk chiffon, new to the house, carried what he called a sense of nudity, “always undeclared”–a balloon dress in oyster silk, sheer throughout, shown again in baby pink. A calla lily cast in steel returned as an earring and as a clasp at the hip. Di Morabito described the flower as something that stiffens what is delicate, strength held inside lightness. His crystal work, a house signature, came in two new ways: a sage crystal-mesh halter trailing a train, and, for the first time, as a mini, draped over the body.
The season’s new gestures were in tailoring, too. A rigid jacket cut to open and cropped as it rose off the waist. Balloon trousers, exaggerated then pulled tight at the ankle, with balloon shorts as their cut-down version. Leg-of-mutton sleeves, taken from costume history, on jackets built without a natural shoulder. Denim turned fully inside out, pockets to the front, belted under a crystal-mesh sash. Di Morabito counted off the references himself: the aesthetic codes of tailoring, the uniform, the leg-of-mutton, the ‘80s shoulder. And finally, the trouser went slim for the first time in a clean cigarette.
Giuseppe Di Morabito rebuilds a coherent vocabulary each season, the menswear tailoring, the corsets, the crystals, and the lace. Barthes, this time, gave the edit a frame–a literate referencing game he always likes to bring back: here, maturity is deciding what deserves to stay.
