Sometimes, All You Need Is a Wacky Shoe

New York Times

01-03-2025

At the Ferrari fashion show early Saturday morning, I beheld a shoe that would surely make design professors yank their hair out, that broke several codes of good taste at once, that pretty much distracted me from seeing anything else in the show. As I said to a seat mate at the show, it was the most deranged shoe I could recall seeing in … years?
I loved it.
The toe was chiseled like the schnoz on a proboscis monkey. A belted strap spanned the width of the front, and then the rest of the upper was open in the style of a Venetian slipper.
'Everyone has some fetishism, and shoes for me are beautiful objects of design,' said Rocco Iannone, the designer of the collection, who wore a similarly chisel-toed loafer. With these, beauty, no doubt, will be in the eye of the beholder.
But beauty isn't the point. For many seasons now, the most exciting garments and styling for men have felt a little off, a little odd, a little too, too much. Clothes that, outside the safe confines of a runway show, might strike us as peculiar, even ludicrous or laughable.
Consider: Moschino, which showed a hat with a giant 'M' protruding from the top like a branded dunce cap. Or the black necktie knotted into an overcoat collar at Emporio Armani that made me wonder if the model had been dressed by Mr. Magoo. Or the way the models at Gucci held the bags not by their straps, but from the top side as if they were nabbing a puppy by the nape — a contrived ploy to distract us from the fact that these were basic duffels we've seen many times.
These concepts also reflect how fashion brands now aim less at the masses than at their cult of converts. So often they are speaking a language their most loyal customers grasp (well, hopefully), but is Greek to anyone else.
But occasionally you glimpse a new design vocabulary that doesn't make you turn away but instead makes you want to sit up and learn it. Thrilling!
That was the case with a Marni show where the creative director Francesco Risso doled out men's clothes direct from 'Pee-wee's Playhouse': pants so expansive across the front that they could accommodate a Subway sandwich and fur collars the size of body pillows. Kooky, yes, but in a way that kind of made you want to be that guy in an overcoat rimmed with a fuzzy collar. Just for a day or two.
And it has been the case with Simone Bellotti, who in two brisk years as Bally's creative director has made that Swiss brand's show a bookmark it, underline it, don't miss it event. For now: It's widely rumored that this was Mr. Bellotti's last Bally show.
For a guy who took his bow wearing a faded Detroit Tigers ball cap, faded black jeans and a fox-gray sweater, he isn't immune to theatrics. (Realistically, we could all stand to dress a bit more like Mr. Bellotti.) A handful of models in the show had their faces painted silver, and there were some thornier ideas present, including a guy in a corset-curved denim trucker jacket, or another in a three-strap belt, like a luxury interpretation of powerlifting gear.
But mostly, what Mr. Bellotti presents are men's clothes that could never be called alien but aren't entirely familiar either. Take the tumbled leather overcoat with the neck hanging down for liberal scarf room, or the swelling, barely-to-the-waist jacket in chartreuse, or the boots with a triangle of studs at the toe. Those were punkish but at a courteous volume.
I left the show wishing I already owned one of the suits with squared off, four-button jackets and sloping 'just stuff your hands in' pockets. That, I thought, is how you casual-ify the suit without destroying its integrity. In it, I'd be me. Only, you know, cooler.