A Milan Fashion Week Full of Surprising Stranger Things

And thus began the season of the weird. After decades in which clothes that telegraphed sex or stealth wealth dominated the Milanese runways, it’s the stranger things that seem the most on target now.

“There’s a feeling that anything could happen, no matter how fantastical,” Matthieu Blazy wrote in his Bottega Veneta show notes, before seating his audience on low-slung leather bean bags in animal shapes — Jacob Elordi plopped down onto a bunny, Michelle Yeoh onto a lady bug. It turned a cavernous warehouse into a fun house and forced every guest to adopt an alternate perspective.

“Well, it’s kind of an irrational time,” Simone Bellotti said in something of an understatement backstage after his brilliant Bally show, inspired by the German Dadaist Hugo Ball.

Indeed, the most eye-catching appearance of the week was not, as it turned out, Mr. Elordi, or Jin of BTS taking a post-military service front row seat at Gucci, but Cheryl Hines, the actress-wife of Robert F. Kennedy Jr. She showed up at Bally just after the news broke about her husband’s sexting relationship with a political reporter. (Apparently Ms. Hines is friends with the brand’s new owner, Michael Reinstein of the global private equity firm Regent.) And the best casting was not Cavalli’s supermodel reunion but Sunnei’s embrace of 70- and 80-something models in its 10th anniversary meditation on time. As opposed to that old fashion shibboleth, timelessness.

You can either retreat into the safety of the elegant chocolate suit (for that, go to MaxMara), the always-appropriate leather trench (at Tod’s, Matteo Tamburini did it best) or you can take the confounding, bizarro nature of this global moment and turn it into a look. The best shows in Milan did.