Stop-and-Shop the Runways

Wanting what we do not need (and what, in a biblical sense, is not ours) is at the core of luxury-goods consumption. And want, more than anything more evolved or cerebral, was the emotion stimulated by the men’s wear shows in Milan this season. Does the world require a linen field jacket with Breton stripes or a navy blazer made from terry cloth piped in white or a safari jacket styled as evening wear and worn with Gurkha trousers and a slightly ludicrous shawl collar waistcoat? It does not.

Yet viewing this stuff at a Ralph Lauren Purple Label presentation at the designer’s elegant palazzo here spurred an irresistible fantasy in this viewer to inhabit a sphere in which Chris Pine is seen wandering through a drawing room in high Gatsby drag, and Colman Domingo is observed resting an elbow, clad in a double-breasted navy suit jacket, on a marble mantelpiece, and Usher saunters by wearing many shades of taupe, a loose-weave sweater casually knotted across his shoulders.

This did, in fact, happen. But though it was in no sense the real world, it was an indication of what fashion is intended for. That is — as nobody has ever understood better than Mr. Lauren — to transport us from our real circumstances.

“Dressing for me has always been an adventure,” Mr. Lauren said in preshow press notes.

Name the person who, while trying on clothes at a store (remember those?), does not temporarily depart from sanity and venture into some unlikely scenario. In one dream scene you are that colleague sauntering into work nonchalantly laying waste to the office competition by wearing, say, one of Silvia Venturini Fendi’s gloriously nothing balmacaan coats in muted madras-cloth patterns.

Or are you that guy in a wonderfully engineered trapeze jacket the color of port wine by Sabato De Sarno at Gucci who coolly strolls into Balthazar? (Is this the place to mention that, despite rumors of Mr. De Sarno’s imminent departure from the label, he more than held his dignified own? This against the provocative backdrop of his predecessor at Gucci, Alessandro Michele, having unexpectedly dropped a first collection as creative director of Valentino titled “Avant le Debut,” of well over 100 resort looks so frilly and granny and echt-Gucci that some wags termed the collection Vucci.)