admin Marco Falcioni came up with the idea for his latest Boss collection on the way back home from the spring ’23 show in Miami, courtesy of inflight entertainment. While kicking back en route, he watched Being John Malkovich and became entranced by the highly stylized and oppressively macabre cinematographic vision of office life in Spike Jonze’s cusp of the millennium classic. And then the thought hit him: “Oh, God: everybody in this film could have been dressed by Boss. Because that was a moment where Boss was really intended as an office uniform.”
Once Falcioni touched down in Europe, his imagination took off as he began to shape the collection we saw (very, very, very) late this evening. It was what he called “corpcore,” an almost anthropological and at times surreal excavation of the tradition of “executive dress” at a social moment where Lazy Girl Jobs are trending and Working Girl feels like a historical document. Remembering the styling of the first ever Hugo Boss womenswear show, Spring 2001 in Milan, with models including Gisele Bündchen styled with paper clips in their chignons, gave him even more material to play with.
Consciously playing with a challenging palette of corp-carpet browns and PC-casing off-whites, Falcioni fashioned a collection that contained some excellent pieces. Two women’s dresses shaped like a shoulder padded jacket with inverted notch lapels and no closures were a clever Jonze-ian flip of the perennial classic. Much of the tailoring was zippered instead of seamed at the spine to create a sense of a second, artificial skin being shed. Ironic touches included pens clipped into chignons and on ties, and old school power briefcases with apparently misplaced combination locks (the code to open them was BOSS).
The show’s sartorial archaeology was countered by a set-up conceit named “techtopia” that saw us seated in a sprawling, close-to Tiffany-green imagined office space of the future, which featured an AI robot named Sophie and lots of Philip K. Dick-adjacent workspace breakout areas. Unlike the still-scarring Brooks Brothers 200th anniversary show in Florence, Falcioni’s subversive reordering of the wardrobe upon which Boss was built was intentional and intelligent, and reflected how what for older customers was once a uniform has become for their children a form of costume.
