The top 5 fall 2016 collections of Milan Fashion Week

Below you will find my top shows from Milan Fashion Week:

1. Prada

“We need to understand who we are today,” Prada declared after the show, surrounded by a three-deep crowd of female journalists. “Everything is symbolic. It is like a collage of what is happy or painful, of whether you are feeling beautiful or horrible, when you have love or no love. I thought of it as like someone who has all the clothes she’s ever had on the floor in front of her in the morning, and she must choose how she’s going to assemble herself.”

2. Gucci

“Catherine de’ Medici and ’70s sport.” “Renaissance biker.” “ ’80s Italian and French couture.” These words, from Lallo25, will be taken as fashion gospel after the Gucci Fall show. Michele compares what he's doing to “Talking in more than one language—there are a lot of ‘sounds.’ It’s like going on Google, or Instagram, where you can find communities. I am obsessed with street style” - he says.

3. Marni

“This time, the proportions were important; I wanted roundness,” Castiglioni said, “and something romantic, but in a modern way.” Then she described the fabrics—which were often compact and molded, to give smooth structure to elliptical shoulder lines and dresses that stood out from the hips—and her surface techniques, which on at least two occasions were so eye-trickingly inventive you just couldn’t tell what was going on. Castiglioni has always been an experimenter in fabric and conceptual forms, but this time the whole put-together piece stepped out of the wearable art class to become stunningly chic.

4. Emilio Pucci

Giorgetti explained, was thinking about what he’s good at, and what Pucci was good at. He found the synergy in activewear. It’s not the most famous part of the Emilio Pucci legacy—the house founder was known more for loungewear than true sport—and it’s certainly not what Giorgetti’s predecessor focused on at the Florentine label (MSGM). But it’s in the archive all the same, and it’s in Giorgetti’s DNA, so voilà.

5. Dolce & Gabbana

“Today, every girl wants to be a princess,” Stefano Gabbana asserted at a preview. “Today, everything is possible for the young generation!” He and Domenico Dolce see themselves as storytellers as much as fashion designers, whose job is to divert people’s anxieties away from reality—much as, well, Walt Disney did himself. “We know how the world is today. Fashion makes people dream—this is the service fashion gives,” Gabbana concluded.