Milan menswear season opened Friday with Federico Cina and a bona fide fashion happening inside the Fondazione Sozzani in the northern rim of the Italian fashion capital.

The Fashion Event

Staged on a chilly yet sunny winter afternoon, the presentation felt more like an art installation by Marina Abramović than a display of clothes.

It seemed an ideal setting for the collection, made in dense almost industrial wools and cut with authority by Cina, a distinctive new Bologna-born designer.

Model/characters enacting mini daily rituals inside plywood boxes, or small stages granting the clothes a certain elegant gravitas.

One rocker gent figure in perfectly cut midnight blue blazer/peacoat stood amid a circle of eight microphones, occasionally gliding up yo a mike one to say just one solemn word.

While a hirsute youth in a white denim jumpsuit sat in a corner unpeeling a hundred oranges painted white. Nearby, a career girl attired in a backless, plissé handkerchief dress marched endlessly around an office chair inside a white skim. In one sense, trapped like an extra in Orson Welles’ “The Trial”; in another, a proud woman going about her business with precision and pride.

“It’s a fashion remembrance, recalling how they dressed for work, special occasion or family events,” explained Cina.

A collection of great poise, and a clever introduction to the ever-growing Fondazione Sozzani, where the founder Carla, and her daughter Sara Maino, Europe’s best young fashion talent diviner, are turning a former ceramics factory into a cool cultural magnet.

Scores of young hipsters thronged around the event. Once the economic and industrial heartland of the post-war Italian renaissance, Milan today is the new Eldorado of design innovation. Where Europe’s youth arrive en masse to discover themselves and suggest a new vision of their roots.