Going for Gold

By Kate Betts/ Milan

While athletes tallied up their Olympic medals in Torino, an hour's journey east in Milan another kind of Olympics played out last week: the style games. And, just like Olympians, Italian fashion designers divide into opposing teams. But instead of medals, they compete for the attention and the dollars of press and buyers from all over the world. The prize could be an "It" handbag with the potential to add hundreds of thousands of dollars to the bottom line, or a winning collection that elevates a designer or a brand to the top of fashion's scoreboard.

This time around, gold-medal brands such as Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana squared off against more stealthy competitors such as Jil Sander and Bottega Veneta in a duel of trends that pitted the ultrasexy look of the '80s against the sober minimalism of the '90s. Sex vs. sobriety is an age-old Milanese rivalry--one that goes back to the early days of Italian ready-to-wear when Giorgio Armani stood on one side of the fashion ring with his sleek, pared-down pantsuits and Gianni Versace fought back with high-octane glamour and glitz. More recently, in the late '90s, Tom Ford played Gucci against the artsier Prada label with the kind of slick vulgarity that made him a fashion champion.

This season there were new players at both Gucci and Jil Sander. In her second season at Gucci, creative director Frida Giannini embraced Ford's sexy legacy with a collection inspired by David Bowie's Ziggy Stardust period, featuring flared pantsuits, slinky jersey minidresses and platform heels. Pitted against the quiet, strong simplicity of Jil Sander, where Belgian menswear designer Raf Simons presented his first collection for women, Gucci might have seemed too vulgar. But as Ann Stordahl, executive vice president of upscale retailer Neiman Marcus, pointed out, "the winds of fashion are changing quickly."

Indeed they are. No sooner had Simons shown a winning combination of severe, boxy jackets over skinny pants and crisp white shirts, heralding a kind of cleansing of the fashion palette--dominated for so long by embellishment and color--than Giannini made an over-the-top '80s play. It may not be a look for everyone, but the kitschy '80s miniskirts and slinky jersey gowns seem to appeal to the Gucci customer. Gucci Group president Robert Polet, upbeat before the show, said that the house's current success is a result of the group's post--Tom Ford strategy, laid out a year and a half ago, which called for a doubling of the group's sales to $4 billion over the next five years. "We're firing on all cylinders," Polet said.

For brands like Fendi and Bottega Veneta, the season's minimalist mood--and requisite plain wool coats and skinny pants--seemed to provide merely a clean backdrop for more ornate (and more profitable) accessories like handbags. And ornate's the word: Fendi's new Palazzo bag, a bucket shape with gold etching, was inspired by the brand's new Roman headquarters, while Bottega Veneta's Madagascar bag is made out of vegetable-dyed crocodile.

Just as happens in the Olympics, where a star comes along and does something quite different from anything seen before, every so often a designer will, for no apparent reason, show something completely out of synch with everything else. In Milan, that designer is usually Miuccia Prada. After several seasons of staying on the groomed slopes, she likes to veer off piste. This season Prada showed a collection as unexpected as it was aggressive. Her models came storming down the winding runway in oversize nylon anoraks and long, slouched-on black coats worn over heavy knit dresses and chunky platform shoes. There were patches of fur down the backs of wool coats, done in such an offhand way as to almost look primitive. Even some of the shoes had fur on the platform heels. The designer said the collection had been inspired by street fashion, Japanese samurai and medieval soldiers. Backstage after the show she called the mood "angry and savage." Then she smiled. Prada knows that to win at the fashion game, designers have to constantly reinvent the rules.