D&G’s picnic-themed collection is a kick in the grass at Milan Fashion Week

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Monday at Milan Fashion Week served up two back-to-back grass-covered fashion shows. The first was Etro’s eco-conscious ‘Tree of Life’ collection, which included gift bags filled with soil and seedling trees (good luck getting that back through customs ... ), as well as a collection filled with climbing-vine motifs that played out across a faux-turf runway.

The second was the show for Dolce & Gabbana’s lower-priced D&G line, where the catwalk was covered with sod so fresh you could smell the earthiness the minute you entered the room. Though, to be fair, let’s remember that Etro did plant a vegetable garden alongside the runway a few seasons back (which required nearly constant watering to keep from wilting under the lights).

Using Édouard Manet’s painting ‘Le déjeuner sur l’herbe’ (‘The Lunch on the Grass’) as a starting point, the Spring/Summer 2011 Menswear collection was a picnic basket packed full of ‘50s-era lunch-on-the-lawn motifs, most notably the bold red-and-white-checked button-front shirts, which evoked the classic image of a picnic blanket, and a garden party’s worth of jackets in pale green, light blue, pink and yellow. (Although a screen-printed T-shirt bearing the image of Johnny Depp circa ‘Cry-Baby’ was a head-scratching non sequitur.)

But my favorites (as an ardent fan of all things tropical) were the aloha-print pieces, including jackets, swim trunks, shorts and button-front shirts festooned with surfers, palm trees, seascapes, exploded florals and pineapples. Lunch on the lawn never looked so luxe.

The travel theme is pretty much a constant at the men’s spring/summer collections, but with this collection, D&G reminded us that traveling can be as easy shrugging into a mint-green jacket or spreading a blanket on the grass.

-- Adam Tschorn, reporting from Milan, Italy

Photos: D&G’s Spring / Summer 2011 menswear show

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