http://www.nytimes.com/2016/09/23/fashion/milan-fashion-week-arthur-arbesser.html 2016-09-23 15:57:59 Arthur Arbesser Has His Friends Around Him In Milan, the designer and his associates work and play together; perhaps it’s a template for a future fashion world. === MILAN — “This is a city dominated by its longstanding fashion families, but I’ve created an alternative family,” said the Milan-based designer Arthur Arbesser. Andy Warhol’s silver-painted Manhattan loft may bear little resemblance to Mr. Arbesser’s Milanese midcentury Luigi Caccia Dominioni building — leased from a friend and shared with the Finnish photographer Henrik Blomqvist. But within this equally coveted real estate, the kind traditionally home to the Milano Bene, the wealthy, conservative members of society, Mr. Arbesser is nurturing his own kind of 21st-century club. Its members not only play together, they work together, and in an increasingly fluid fashion world, that might be a template for the future. “A five-minute telephone call with someone that intellectually stimulates you is far better than a Google search,” said Marco de Vincenzo, Mr. Arbesser’s friend and a fellow designer. Although the radical Italian design groups of the 1950s and ’60s like Superstudio and Archizoom — and later, Memphis — have been well documented, the idea of such collective fashion endeavors is relatively new to Milan. It makes Mr. Arbesser, Franca Sozzani, the editor of Italian Vogue, said in an email, a “new group aggregator.” As to that group — well, they were all there at his apartment for drinks one balmy Sunday evening in this month. Mariuccia Casadio, an actual Warhol Factory alum, writer and contemporary art curator, arrived in an Arbesser knit with an arrow motif and a lilac-tinged coiffure. The Russian model Nastya Shershen, one of the designer’s many muses, came wearing track shorts and toting her one-month old daughter, Chloe. Dorian Stefano Tarantini, a suave punk nightclub impresario turned the designer known as Dorian Gray, was in black leather — he runs his own high-end streetwear label, Malibu 1992, and composes the Arbesser show music. He was alongside Ilenia Corti, a softly spoken, raven-haired jewelry designer with a whimsical line called Vernissage, holding court on Mr. Arbesser’s newly purchased Superstudio “Sofo” sofa. Ms. Corti has designed a jewelry collection for Mr. Arbesser that will be shown during his runway presentation on Sunday. And, “she’s also very present in the Milanese night scene,” Mr. Arbesser whispered. Nearby was Fabio Cherstich, the director who was in the midst of a production called “Figaro! Opera Camion,” to be performed from the back of a truck in Palermo, Sicily. Mr. Arbesser said he was an opera nerd when he was growing up in Vienna: “I would buy a standing ticket for, like, twenty shillings and stand for three hours to guard my position.” And there was Selva Barni, a sleek brunette, who curated an exhibition at the Palazzo Reale, “Ho Visto Un Re” (The King and I), that features Mr. Arbesser’s work The factory’s chief gatekeeper is the architect Luca Cipelletti. He instigates the group’s seasonal fix: a real estate reconnaissance throughout Milan to uncover its lost structures. Mr. Arbesser and Mr. Cipelletti bonded years ago when the architect insisted that the designer view Converted into a vast exhibition hall, the space includes a walkway more than 260 feet long that will serve as the museum’s new entrance, and on Sunday, Mr. Arbesser’s runway. “It’s a little scary,” he said back in his home. “I look at the size of it and I think maybe I’m better off showing in a disused garage as a small brand. I mean, Gucci could show there.” Mr. Cipelletti, who convinced the museum’s director to reject bids from larger fashion houses, ensuring that Mr. Arbesser got the space, dismissed his friend’s concerns. “Arthur’s work fits,” he said. “We have the same visual conversation, appreciate the same brutalist lines and layers of time. He’s not going to cover it up and transform it into something else.” “Luca is the ultimate perfectionist,” responded Mr. Arbesser, later saying that there were times when the architect had pushed him to achieve a level of perfection he felt unable to achieve. “Sometimes I’m just like, ‘Give me a break.”’ At 34, Mr. Arbesser is still considered a young designer in the industry. He moved to Milan after graduating from Central Saint Martins in London, and began his career with a seven-year stint designing women’s wear at Armani before striking out on his own in 2013. His clean designs — uniform-inspired tailoring, geometric knitwear and quirky prints — may appear serendipitous and offhand, but he painstakingly mines his inspirations for content. Or so noted his friend, the critic Marco Sammicheli, while lounging on a dining chair. “Progress depends on crossing borders and exiting one’s comfort zone,” he said. Like, for example, going to the weekend bolt-hole in Portofino that Mr. Cipelletti shares with Paola Clerico. (Her well-heeled appearance belies her somewhat subversive curatorial practice, which focuses on site-specific installations such as “Case Chiuse,” an Italian metaphor for brothel that literally translates as “closed house,” an initiative that exhibits artworks in private spaces.) But their house was in “the other Portofino” — far from the hype, a steep wooded hill above the perfectly coiffured bay below, where they often flee to regroup and brainstorm future projects. “You’re alone with wild boars up there,” Mr. Arbesser said. “The last time we stayed there a very charming lady dressed in cargo pants and a T-shirt turned up. It was only after she left we found out it was the Duchess of Westminster,” Natalia Grosvenor. Mr. Arbesser admits that he finds the worlds of design and architecture easier to navigate than the fashion crowd. “They tend to be more humble, more open,” he said. The exception to both is Mr. Arbesser’s partner of 10 and half years, Fabio Giglio, whom he met dancing at a club during the Salone del Mobile in Milan, and who bears a startling resemblance to the character Kramer in “Seinfeld.” “Although he’s a doctor,” who specializes in bone marrow transplants at a university hospital in the city, “he’s very good at public relations,” Mr. Arbesser said. Hence Mr. Giglio’s self-appointed role as dispenser of prosecco and cashews before dinner. “I think he enjoys the change of scenery now and again,” Mr. Arbesser said. Especially because, fodder for creativity though it may be, not a single frame of the evening ends up on Instagram.