Philipp Plein’s Spring 2021 Menswear Collection

The filmed presentation prefaced Plein’s modeling debut with a montage showing the impressive curve in the number of guests at his show since the first in 2004 (140) to the last in January (6,000). Then a montage about the coronavirus. Then we faded to footage of Plein and colleagues working on handmade sneakers in one of his factories in Italy, under the extremely reasonable narration: “In these challenging times we have to reinvent ourselves. We have to focus on craftsmanship, quality, and our clients. Only the best will survive. This is the renaissance, the rebirth, of fashion.”

What followed was Plein modeling a full Philipp Plein wardrobe, interestingly sometimes pausing to discuss the handmade eagle applique on one biker jacket, or the shiny vs. matte finish on another (crocodile) example. He said that when shooting he’d given a full rundown on almost every piece, but his producers had convinced him not to run the full edit—too long. The moment when he paused to spritz from a credit card flacon of No Limits, the new perfume whose packaging and marketing distills the fantasies of many 14-year-olds (and probably many 40-year-olds, too), was especially entertaining.

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