Creativity emerges in quieter, digital Milan Fashion Week

MILAN (AP) — Fashion is off the hamster wheel, taking a deep breath that is allowing some freshness to seep into the once relentless cycle.

“It is so weird thinking about fashion, and the kind of hamster wheel of fashion, and how we never had a break and always complained about it,’’ Marc Jacobs said during a Milan Fashion Week video chat with Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons post-digital show. “And then you get a break, and you complain.”

Instead, he said, he was taking the moment to watch others, and be inspired.

Milan Fashion Week of mostly womenswear previews for next fall and winter wrapped a nearly all-digital edition on Monday. And while the bustle of live shows with the parade of itinerant fashionistas decamping from New York to London, Milan and finally Paris was missed, designers also found new inspiration in the quiet.

Austrian designer Arthur Arbesser shrank his collection to just 25 looks, which he presented in visits to his Milan studio and video calls, opting out of a digital runway show.

For the creations, he upcycled textiles from previous collections that had been stashed in a studio cubbyhole. The designer revitalized them either by printing a new design on the other side, in the case of a pretty pleated skirt, or printing over the original with a different pattern, in the case of a black architectural detailing over a striped cotton.

Arbesser said the enforced quiet of the COVID-19-era restrictions, along with the necessity of saving money, pushed other creative forces to the fore. He and his team created a patchwork minidress out of cotton, silk and technical nylon, and they experimented with Shibori hand-dying for a wool mini.

The collection bears Arbesser’s love of prints, this season’s inspired by an actual painter’s palette that...