The upcoming Michael Mann movie Ferrari, starring San Diego–born Adam Driver as Modena’s greatest son, Enzo Ferrari, will doubtless be gripping stuff: It has also raised some fascinating questions about double standards when it comes to who should or should not stay in their cultural lane. As the great Italian actor Pierfrancesco Favino (check out Nostalgia) recently observed of Driver’s perfectly named casting: “There’s an issue of cultural appropriation…the parts are given to foreign actors who are distant from the story’s real protagonists, starting with the exotic accents.” As with everything else this Milan Fashion Week, there is also a Gucci angle to this debate.
Two years into Ferrari’s clothing project, the question remains: Why is Italy’s greatest automotive marque trying to act like a fashion house? Creating a collection that encapsulates the answer is the knotty brief faced by Rocco Iannone, who this morning continued his work to find it. In part, a drastic reduction of logos (although the house horse pranced in metal on several workwear pieces and the house-name-adorned underwear) suggested Iannone is trying to soften the line of questioning.
The most exhilarating and transportive moment of this show, however, came when Iannone stopped idling through a stop-and-start series of perfectly pleasant themes—white leather, ribbed knits, perforated leather, rusty metallics, and more—and just throttled it. Delivering his carefully ergonomic shapes in Rosso Corsa leather created an immediate connection between the core iconography of the automotive brand and its clothes, while retaining an identity for the collection that was more than merch. As Iannone astutely pointed out in a prechat, “power and eroticism” are the gasoline of Ferrari’s legend. Today’s burst of pace at the finish line delivered a blast of both.