Philosophy Di Lorenzo Serafini’s Essentialised S/S'23 Show

Think of Philosophy Di Lorenzo's spring/summer 2023 as a poetic palate cleanser. Purified silhouettes, that riffed on the design codes of Romeo Gigli and Giorgio di Sant’Angelo, and featured a lick of latex, defined the label's latest offering. Here, British Vogue’s fashion critic Anders Christian Madsen breaks down the five biggest takeaways from the show.

The collection marked a new direction

It was a season of change for Philosophy where Lorenzo Serafini traded his sumptuous quirkiness of collections past for a stricter and more reduced approach to the romance at the heart of the brand. “It’s more mature. Less girly and more woman. More sensual and less decorative,” he concurred after the show. “Maybe I’m growing older! I felt it was time for a change.”

It was purified realness

Presented in a brightly lit optical white runway room, the collection was purified and straight-to-the-point: the romantic codes of Philosophy distilled to their very essence in a clean, contemporary palate cleanser that had a re-energising effect. “They’re very easy dresses. They’re all cottons. They’re real dresses. They’re not made for the show. They’re something you can picture with your eyes closed. They stay in reality, and on the street,” Serafini said.

It referenced two designer icons

“It was about the essentials: the lines,” the designer explained, revealing two unlikely sources of inspiration for the atmosphere he had ultimately created: the work of Romeo Gigli and Giorgio di Sant’Angelo. “Even though they are two of an opposite world,” Serafini said, “we wanted to evolve the way that the body was blooming with this kind of dressing.” He drew on the knots and twirls of Gigli’s construction in elegant dresses that could be adapted on the body. “All these dresses you can move and drape on your body yourself, and make them longer or shorter, or keep sleeves on or off, or make them sit high or low.”

It gave us Toile De Jouy latex

By reducing his references to their core structural language, Serafini arrived at a constrained but highly graphic form language that suited Philosophy. Even a Toile De Jouy brought back from his second collection for the brand had been contemporised as a print on latex trousers and tops that served as kind of optical illusion. It brought a sexiness to an otherwise sensual collection, which kept a constant balance between romance and a sense of rock “n” roll.

It was a reset for the mind

“I think we’re living in a period where it’s so rare to get something… I don’t want to say minimal, but clean, at least. Everywhere you look, everything is so extreme, so over-styled and over-decorated. I really felt like I wanted something to clean up everything and start a new path,” Serafini said. It felt like the right one.