Ningbo Textiles

Milan Men’s Fashion Week Fall 2011 on ftv.com fashiontv Albino Deuxieme Backstage Some designers think of their men’s collections as extensions of their women’s—clothes for the counterparts to their female clients. Not Albino D’Amato. His women’s line, Albino, is mature and ladylike, and while not without its own kicky twists, like bold colors and fabric play, it’s indisputably grown-up. D’Amato’s menswear, on the other hand, which is designed under the name Albino Deuxieme—”Deuxieme,” the designer emphasized before his Milan show this week, to underscore the distance from the first—taps youth culture for its vigor. This season, the label’s second, the designer drew inspiration from a trip to the capitals of northern Europe. “I found a new vibration,” he says of traveling in Scandinavia. There, young men “mix streetwear with tailored pieces—jogging pants with their father’s jacket.” Father’s jackets proved a potent jumping-off point, and the show’s Nordic-looking models wore their soft topcoats slung over their shoulders, like gifts from dad they were half growing out of. If the style was borrowed from the great European north, so too was the palette, in icy silver and slate, with pops of teal (a color that’s recurred more than you might expect this menswear season). As far as the aesthetic here was from Albino’s womenswear, there were points of overlap. There was a familiar attention to material in a pair of baggy, trouser-cut jeans shot through with cashmere, and coats …