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Show Report

Show Report: Dsquared2 A/W 15 Menswear

by Lou Stoppard on 17 January 2015

Lou Stoppard reports on the Dsquared2 A/W 15 menswear show.

Lou Stoppard reports on the Dsquared2 A/W 15 menswear show.

DSquared2 are 20 years old. It's apt that they were kicking off Milan Fashion Week as they symbolise everything we love Italian style for - sex, sex and sex. They'd offered us something of a retrospective for A/W 15, a bit of a greatest hits; in other words, a tour of Dean and Dan Caten's deepest darkest fantasies and age-old obsessions.

They'd held the show in a huge hangar housing Anselm Kiefer's The Seven Heavenly Palaces. Perhaps the work, with all its connotations of growth, possibility and potential spoke to the duo, who no doubt were feeling tough and mighty on the occasion of their label's anniversary. Perhaps not. Knowing Dean and Dan, the appeal of the towers was something altogether more phallic if the topless boys with mud-stained jeans slung below their hips on the runway were anything to go by. But you can forgive the Catens for the mishmash of hillbilly and rock'n'roll references as their own fashion heritage is something of a clash - they're fiercely proud of their Candadian roots, but wonderfully true to Italian spirit at the same time. The former came through in the lumberjack shirts, parkas and endless pairs of Hockney trousers (the Caten's signature style, baggy at the top and skinny on the ankles), the latter in the closing section, a run of sharp, embroidered suits that offered a much needed reminder after all that denim of the pair's skill as tailors.

The duo chose to both open and close their show with female models (the first in shrunken leather and knee high boots, the last in a bizarre ballgown-with-parka get up). They were like two hostesses chaperoning the party, cheerleaders for the boisterous, pumped up boys. But Dean and Dan are all about sexual objectification, of both men and women. It's all tight t-shirts, visible boxers, short skirts; a festival of cliches. They'd continued that slightly nostalgic mood by looping in Mary J. Blige to round things off by serenading us all with One, a vaguely ironic choice given that DSquared2 is so resolutely about two. Though maybe that was a comment on the unbreakable bond of twins; the duo do like to take a bow in the same outfit, after all.

Really, it wasn't One that summed up the show best but another of the tracks - one in a medley of classics - that played towards the end of the show: Nirvana's Smells Like Teen Spirit. Dean and Dan are still just teenagers. Naughty, insolent, lustful - they'll never grow up.

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