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It wouldn’t be 10 am on a Tuesday morning at Milan Fashion Week without a bunch of boys in 40s-style long johns taking off their shirts and throwing them into to the crowd. Thus ended Dean and Dan Caten’s jazz age extravaganza for Dsquared². A show, which didn’t just give guests a jazz bar set – complete with a swing band and lustful femme fatales of the Veronica Lake kind – but also saw the Catens venture onto new tailoring territories. “It started with the tailoring. It was feeling 40s to us. We used a new construction where there’s absolutely no construction. The shoulders are soft, there are no pads. That gave it a flavour of 40s and the atmosphere started growing,” a tuxedo-clad Dan told i-D after the show. A double-breasted blazer in a jade and royal purple tartan stood out and complemented the season’s fondness of all things check, but with the 40s angle intact – an angle, which has been exclusive to Dsquared² so far in the show schedule. “[The decade] was alive, it was on fire. I think that’s also why we chose to have all-black casting, because the guys have a lot of attitude and sex appeal.” And in a decade that’s not dissimilar to the post-Depression 40s, drawing on that particular moment in time perhaps wasn’t at all irrelevant. “No,” Dan laughed. “We’re not trying to go that deep. We’re not that complicated.”
Text: Anders Christian Madsen
Photography: Mitchell Sams
