Villa Mozart, a Saturday morning in Milan. Simon Holloway built an entire collection around one garment and trusted it to carry the room.
Dunhill showed its spring collection as a presentation during Milan Fashion Week Men's, the second stop on the menswear calendar after Pitti Uomo. The anchor was the blue blazer, shown in almost every degree of formality. Holloway described the season to Wallpaper* as a love letter to the blazer. He built the morning around proving the point.
The blazer, many ways
Navy did the expected work. Then the blazer loosened into a longer cut that read somewhere between a sports coat and a pea coat. A double-faced reefer arrived in rare Escorial wool. A sports coat came in worsted cashmere panama, woven in Huddersfield, where the house has long sourced its cloth.
The surprise was colour. A double-breasted jacket in vivid aquamarine, worn over a white turtleneck with pale blue trousers, carried the strongest look of the morning. Sky blue ran through chinos and lighter tailoring. The palette held close to navy, grey and summer neutrals, with the brighter notes used in small doses.
British men, real and imagined
Holloway framed the collection as a character study of British masculine identity. The references named Roger Moore in a white turtleneck and blue blazer, Lord Snowdon, and Lucian Freud. This is the second season running that Snowdon has turned up on Holloway's mood board.
The detail reached for the same world. An archival Art Deco table lighter, marked with playing-card motifs, fed into the accessories. Superfine kid mohair carried an Eighties cut. Silk dupioni evening suits were woven on antique looms that date to the 1960s.
The blue blazer is the most ordinary thing in a man's wardrobe. Holloway spends a season showing how much room there is inside it.
The Splendid EditA wardrobe with a use
Holloway set the clothes against real occasions. Summer travel. Evening dinners. City dressing where the cut and the cloth do the work and ornament stays out of it. Nothing here asked to be noticed for its own sake.
Dunhill S/S 2027, Milan. Courtesy of Dunhill
Dunhill sits inside Richemont, a group known more for watches and jewellery than for tailoring. Holloway has spent his recent seasons arguing that the house holds a clear point of view. The blazer, turned over and over until it gave up its range, is a confident way to make the argument.