After onboarding Matteo Tamburini last December in order to change its creative direction, Tod’s hosted his first show for the house at Milan’s largest tram depot at the tail-end of rush hour this morning. We sat surrounded by the city’s wonderfully elegant yolk yellow 1500-series streetcars—they’re nearly 100-years-old, and still going strong—to watch a collection that Tod’s hopes will spark desire among a fresh demographic. At a house that has always been more engaged with private jets than mass transit, both this venue and the leather metro card lanyards worn by some of Tamburini’s imaginary procession of commuters signaled that shift of gear.
That’s not to say that Tamburini’s debut represented a downgrade in terms of fabrication or visible quality: it was more that the intended audience was wider. Sure, his office-bound travelers were a runway fantasy and the heated seating this audience was treated to was a step up from the 9-to-5 reality. However, as a regular user of Milan’s public transport system, I can attest that this city’s real-life commuters can be a devastatingly put-together workforce: just check out Scott Schuman’s Instagram for further evidence.
The motifs that ran through this collection were the belts featuring gleaming hardware inspired by vintage Alfa Romeo grilles, and the house’s emblematic driving shoes that came with enlarged and more robust gommino traction on the soles. Impractical for a rainy morning (like today’s) but highly satisfying to swoosh around the office in, some of these shoes arrived with extravagant leather fringing, a detail that was echoed further down the line in leather scarves. Just as the Tod’s shoes came with that finely-calibrated customization to take them beyond the norm, Tamburini applied strokes of subtle oddness—double-collared shirting, hyper-break pants, four layered wool and silk falling-off charcoal “twinsets,” pushed proportion leather-panel trenches, knits in stiff boiled cashmere—to almost every look.
There were some Tod’s-typical, finely-fashioned paragons of leather outerwear that were often double-faced against tailoring fabrics, plus one patched goat-hide topcoat. Bags continued the trend for super-soft arm candy—great for resting your head against during an unforeseen transit failure—via foldable shoppers and pillow-soft totes. The cast passed to an imaginary way-to-work playlist that included Leonard Cohen’s “Avalanche,” Bjork’s “Hunter” and Nirvana’s “All Apologies,” a trio that suggested a sense of borderline-nihilistic disillusion about the artists’ career trajectories. Yet after this first runway shift, both Tod’s and Tamburini had nothing to feel sorry for: it did the job.
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