In Milan yesterday, Etro chose light.
Not the blinding light of glamour, nor the artificial glow of the runway, but a light that slowly changes, that moves across surfaces, fades colours, reveals and conceals at once. “Halo,” the title of the Spring Summer 2027 collection, is first and foremost an atmosphere: an aura surrounding the body, an almost intangible presence accompanying the transformation of the house.
Following the departure of Marco De Vincenzo, Etro is entering a season of transition. Rather than seeking a clean break, however, the house has chosen continuity. But a more elusive, more delicate kind of continuity. The codes of the house remain recognisable — paisley, prints, a taste for travel, a fascination with ornament — and yet they seem to have lost their weight, as if left for a few hours beneath the sun.
This is where the collection finds its direction.
Paisley is not celebrated; it is transfigured. It appears enlarged, dissolved, almost liquid. The prints seem to be touched by light until they become shadows of themselves. It is an apparently simple gesture, but a significant one: Etro does not abandon its most recognisable code; it removes it from immediate recognition.
The palette follows the same movement. Colours evoke the passing of time: the soft tones of dawn, the yellows and oranges of high summer, the greens and blues announcing evening, leading finally to the deeper shades of night. An entire day condensed into clothes.
And within this light, the body moves.
Dresses glide, open, lengthen. Fringes and transparencies introduce movement, while trailing silhouettes seem to leave a trace behind them rather than a defined shape. Sensuality is never declared; it is suggested. It lives in the material, in the way a fabric follows the body in motion, in the skin revealed beneath a sheer layer, in the distance between what a garment chooses to show and what it keeps hidden.
Yet it would be easy — and reductive — to read the collection solely through the lens of bohemian romanticism.
Because alongside its more fluid and dreamlike dimension come sharply cut trousers, denim, suede, blousons and more pragmatic constructions. The wardrobe constantly moves between escape and reality. Between the dream of travel and the demands of the city.
Perhaps this is the collection’s most contemporary gesture: Etro no longer asks a woman to choose between the real world and the imaginary one.
She can wear an ethereal dress and, moments later, a suede jacket. She can move from gladiator sandals to ballet flats, from tailoring to absolute lightness. Freedom is no longer simply an aesthetic attitude, but a tangible possibility to shift between different identities.
In this sense, “Halo” is also about identity.
What remains of a fashion house when the person who shaped its vision moves on? How far can a code evolve before it loses its meaning? Etro seems to answer without forcing the question. The new does not necessarily have to arrive as a revolution. It can emerge slowly, almost imperceptibly, from within what already exists.
It is a delicate strategy, even a risky one, in a fashion system accustomed to the constant announcement of novelty.
Etro chooses instead nuance.
And perhaps that is the word that remains after the show: nuance. In the prints, in the colours, in the silhouettes, but above all in the relationship with its own history. The past is neither archived nor nostalgically celebrated. It is placed in a new light.
Like a landscape seen through a train window as day turns into evening, when, for a fleeting moment, the contours of things can no longer be clearly distinguished.
Etro seems to be precisely there today: in that suspended moment between what has been and what is yet to become.
And if “Halo” truly marks the beginning of a new chapter, its promise is not to forget the identity of the house, but to make it desirable again through a subtler gesture: to change the light.
Not to change Etro.
But to see it differently.
