Floral shirts are seeing an entirely unexpected upgrade in the most recent fall-winter collections in online displays and on the most famous shopping streets. Until a few years ago, we wouldn’t have dreamed of wearing cool, flower-themed prints, in new shapes and colour palettes, in the middle of autumn, but driven by stakeholders in the sector, the market is opening up to a freer, more positive view of outfits that are not tied to seasons and offer a wider choice of themes and colours. But this style revolution is not just shaking off seasonal constraints. Red carpets and runways from Venice to Milan and Paris have given their credibility to looks proposing flower print shirts for men, with the same cool style as the items designed for women.
A whirlwind of colours and floral decorations is now the leitmotiv of men’s shirts as well as women’s dresses, as worn by the international film and TV stars who have stepped onto the red carpets at the Venice and Cannes film festivals. One example of this fresh, new look - revamped by international magazines because of the choice of this garment rather than a classic suit that reveals very little of the self, is Elle Fanning, a stand-out at festivals whose choices are never casual and include dresses and “pyjamas” with romantic flower patterns that she hasa called a real passion.
From red carpet to runway, Etro is this season’s promoter of this menswear trend, with a mix-and-match of prints in which the jungle shirt is even made to pop by the brocade blouson jacket and its similar colour palette. In Venice, Alessandro Michele, Creative Director at Gucci, who in recent years has made an enormous contribution to breaking down gender-barriers in matters of style, limited himself to putting into practice the positivity that comes from the freedom of representing oneself, as someone who can carry off a look with a provocative irony. Oscar Isaac – in a digital flower print shirt – and Jessica Chastain chose rather to feed on their success with the most famous kiss at the Venice film festival, keeping up a style that’s more in tune with tradition, but drawing the attention of the whole world to themselves with a gesture that sent the world crazy.
