Silvia Venturini Fendi, her daughter Leonetta Luciano Fendi, Clara Tosi Pamphilli, Andrea Buccella, Alessio de’ Navasques, and fashion friends observe Adal’s Nora Renaud at work.

Giacomo Guidi’s new gallery, set to open in September at 17, Largo Cristina di Svezia, next to Rome’s Orto Botanico (botanical gardens) in Trastevere, was the launch pad for the curators of  A.I. Artisanal Intelligence, architect Clara Tosi Pamphili and Alessio de’ Navasques’ latest show “Roman Inspirations.”  A.I. stages shows twice a year, in January and July, in Rome during Altaroma to highlight the relationship between fashion, art, design, film and vintage. Their curation has also hit the road with an exhibition recently in Korea, and a show last June at the Bauer during Venice’s Biennale of Architecture.

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Rome’s native son Fabio Quaranta took to the runway at the Complesso Monumentale S. Spirito in Sassia, just around the corner from the Vatican, on the second day of Altaroma. Quaranta lives and works in Rome and his sophisitcated blend of tailoring and workwear for men (and women who like to borrow their clothes) reflects the laid back cool of this city. He street cast the show including one of his customers, an organist at a nearby church who played a morning service beforehand. Quaranta zeroed in on the timeless high/low style of artists, a mix of dressed-up and dressed-down that takes them from a dusty atelier to dinner at a trattoria in Rome’s Monti. Quaranta’s store, Motelsalieri (162 via Giovanni Lanza/ http://www.motelsalieri.com/) in Monti stocks his label, Carol Christian Poell, Comme des Garçons, Junya Watanabe, and also doubles as a performance space for the musicians and artists he loves.

As Quaranta describes his look in the show notes: “It’s the aesthetic dichotomy found among certain names in art, music and literature, the protagonists of the last fifty years of international culture.” He name checked a few of these strong identities: William Burroughs, Joseph Beuys, Marcel Duhamp, George Harrison, the more contemporary Michael Gira and Billy Childish, and a few more obscure names including Little Annie (aka Little Annie Anxiety Bandez, a New York City singer, songwriter, painter, poet, writer, performing and recording artist, pastor and stage actor) and Douglas P. (aka Douglas Pierce, an English folk musician, record label owner, photographer and actor who records under the name Death in June).

The collection’s tailored jackets and coats in workwear fabrics and square cut vests with workwear zippers showed in natural colors and interesting mixtures of silk, fine cotton and Italian denim. Quaranta opted for a roomy fit inspired by 1940s workwear and used mini camouflage for jacquards that gave his southern Italian country gentleman look a dose of pop.

Altaroma is  traditionally for women, but Quaranta showed both. And it’s not that he’s added a women’s collection. At least not yet. Right now, the label’s female fans just take what they want from the boys. “Many women wear my clothes, so it seemed natural to show menswear on both,“ he said backstage. “So far, the only thing we’ve had to do specifically for women is the shoes.”

Luigi Borbone’s flowing caftans, in patterned silks, Swarovski elements and whimsically handpainted Latex, opened Altaroma on Saturday afternoon at the Palazzo Corsini, a baroque palace in Rome’s arty Trastevere neighborhood. Borbone, trained as an architect and studied fashion at Central Saint Martins before returning to Rome where he was first featured by Altaroma in 2012.

Borbone favors the simplicity of pure, geometric shapes and in this collection was inspired by iconic women from the Middle Ages and what he calls a “distrubing” Marie Antoinette. Clara Tosi Pamphili art directed the show that featured original music from Diego Buongiorno and new French chanteuse Loane.

Mérit Oppenheim’s 1980 “Portrait with Tattoos,” a close up of the artist’s face superimposed with the markings of butterfly wings, was prominent on Damir Doma’s mood board this season and the idea of symmetry and irregularities in nature was on his mind. In its seventh year, his eponymous label isn’t brand new, nor entrenched, just growing steadily. To shine the light on his brand, Doma opened the doors to his house for an installation, film and magazine with art direction by Tiffany Godoy, images by Carlotta Manaigo, soundscapes by Fédéric Sanchez and visual effects from Daniel Adric.

The collection was ultra-simple: ¾ coat jackets in stiff silk; wide, cropped pants in palm frond patterned jacquard; a scarf neck tunic in slubbed stripes on a translucent ground; clean blouson with an asian V-neck and distressed rib waist; vest multi-belted across the chest, and orchid markings in prints, on cut velvet and cut outs on tunics and body tracing shirt jackets. All this made for an elegant, casual wardrobe that defies stereotypes and age brackets in loose, effortless style to wear with sleek, thick-strapped snadals. RV

Volez, Voguez, Voyager—Fly, Sail, Travel—Louis Vuitton’s mantra this season, inspired by early 20th century LV graphics, was an invitation to take off; what could be more luxurious than that? Kim Jones’s seasonal travels have introduced so many exotic stimuli into menswear from Masai-inspired plaids for his SS12 debut to FW13’s “Garden in Hell” print with the Chapman brothers inspired by the kingdom of Bhutan…So where next? Answer: India. Taking advice he had long ago from Louise Wilson, and also because his parents named him after Rudyard Kipling’s “Kim,” Jones spent ten days travelling in and around Rajasthan from Jaipur to the Taj Mahal.

And from that visit came an injection of color, pattern, handwork, military tailoring, and a new higher waist and slightly flared leg for Louis Vuitton. Jones dedicated the collection to Wilson who passed away recently. And he explored several new directions for menswear.

Chiffon, zigzag pattern short sleeve shirts flew like bright,Indian flags teamed with high waist, sundial buckled trousers. There was a slight seventies feeling here, but it’s more about the guards of the palaces in Rajasthan than hippies. Bomber jackets, flight suits and patchwork polos in pink, orange and khaki evoked jodhpur princes in the air and on horseback while the white and black croc sneakers were the latest in casual opulence. Meanwhile, new trunk designs, one with everything a composer needs and a guitar case with sheepskin lining updated Louis Vuitton’s special order offer. Finally, taking the bomber and flight suit into indigo blue and covering it with Indian Shisha mirrored embroidery, a hybrid of Indian embellishment and military style, was something out of the blue from one of fashion’s most free-flowing minds. RV

When one thinks of the Ballet Russes, so frequently mined in fashion, most memorably by Yves Saint Laurent in his spring 1976 couture collection, one imagines a sniewy, androgynous creature. So when Rick Owens mentioned Nijinsky’s “l’Après-Midi d’un Faune” as inspiration, it was a surprise to see how he brought this into his own, more substantial, chunkier, men’s wear. As usual, the first look said the most: a stiff, bleached denim tunic with geometric seaming and hem destruction over huge, stand-away black shorts and the best shoe collaboration: a rubbery, pinched-together, boot in pewter metallic or matte white with a squishy Adidas Springblade sole.

The tunics gradually became dress-like and some of Owens’ fauns were sprayed head to toe in the collection’s clay colors. There was little distinction between jackets and coats here; a reminder of the simplified, multipurpose way men dress today. Mid-show, Owens turned into a sculptor, twisting fabric around the body in proper faun mode, but he was soon back to tunics, mixing leather and silky fabric color blocks. One-shoulder chest harnesses were warrior-like, and the full body embroideries on color block coats were marvelous flights of fancy. RV

Images by Valerio Mezzanotti

Federico Capalbo, 32, is that rare thing, an Italian designing in London. And his collection Komakino, named after a Joy Division song and launched in 2007, is just as crossover as he is. The production is in Italy and that, along with Capalbo’s sexy austerity and the fact that’s he is Italian, gives a certain polish and sensuousness to this street wise collection. Shown in a small Paris gallery, it offered a stylistic dream vision of tough boys with an anarchic London accent. The clothes are slightly menacing in a quite elegant way. The basketball shorts in fine wool and Capalbo’s rendering of the MA-1 bomber jacket looked chic in black and grey. Capalbo mixed the sports shapes with tailoring, and treated the tailoring in sport fabric. He’s into slogans as evidenced by Komakino’s “High Tech Low Life” on shirt plackets and elsewhere. And he has inserted a certain surgical element with “biopsy” cuts that allow a slash of fluorescent color to shine through the seaming of his moody, dark pieces. RV