Fashion Review: Hot Pockets at Fendi

MILAN — The women’s empowerment movement can take designers down some unexpected paths, their compasses swiveling between the magnetic poles of relevance and originality, mapping out their season with varying degrees of success.

At Fendi, for example, speaking before the show, the designer Karl Lagerfeld said, “We call this collection ‘G.P.’” He was joking, not about Gwyneth Paltrow, but rather the giant pockets affixed to a perforated shearling anorak (“air-conditioned fur!” chortled Mr. Lagerfeld). Also the pockets on the front of a cropped crisp white shirt, a see-through plastic mac, the hem of a butter-soft leather bustier dress; the pockets of different sizes hung from belts and on bags; and the pockets labeled “keys” and “coins” and “phone.” Among many other pockets.

The kind of pockets, in other words, that men have been able exploit for years in suit jackets and that now were available to women in a collection that married utilitarian functionality to a bit of parrot-embroidered fantasy via silvery jacquard or tulle dresses and shaved mink (Fendi being one of the few brands that has no truck with the current trend toward fur-free, holding fast to the need to support the craftspeople it employs).

Pockets because, said Silvia Venturini Fendi — herself an empowered woman, and the creator of the Defender, a sort of outerwear for your handbag — if you have to multitask, so should your clothes.

Or they can take you to otherwise, perhaps understandably, unexplored territory, as at MaxMara. There, thinking about the current moment got the design team thinking about classical history (goddess power), which got them thinking about their own history, which led them to Emily Wilson (translator of “The Odyssey”), and Margaret Atwood and Anne-Marie Beretta, who pretty much defined the corporate power coat for the brand in 1981, which in turn led them to the invention of … calf spats!

What else to call the snap-on lower pant legs, stretching up from the ankle to just above the knee, that appeared under narrow skirts and dresses ruched and knotted at the waist and knee-length tailored culottes. All of it was paired with shoulder- (if not breast-) baring tops in shiny vinyl, silk and cotton, occasionally decorated with stiff ruffles tracing the outline of arms like Komodo dragon frills and bobbing from the front of T-shirts and hems like amphibious sea creatures?

They suggested both an office-fooling trompe l’oeil trouser-under-skirt look and, when a flash of thigh appeared, stockings sans garter belts. Cross-body bags slung like arrow quivers just underscored the point.

Corporate peons, get ready. The Amazon executive dominatrix has entered the building. Whether consumers follow is up to them.