Daks Spring 2018 Ready-To-Wear...Fashionweekly....On Fow24news.com

If you’re English, Daks looks ersatz. That’s because this is a vision of Englishness designed by an Italian and intended for a predominantly Asian clientele.....
Today’s collection focused on rowing, nominally the Henley Royal Regatta. This still-going but pretty anachronistic moment in the long-faded “season” for an English social set whose importance has been supplanted by the international super-rich is, admittedly, a seductive notion. Sturdy chaps in striped rowing blazers and boater hats quaffing down the Pimms alongside lissome English roses in floaty ethereal frocks, that sort of thing.

In front of a backdrop mounted with antique oars and sculls, this womenswear-peppered-with-menswear show made smooth enough progress down its parquet runway. There were lots of perfectly acceptable white cotton plissé pants and skirts worn with shirts rolled up on the sleeve and teamed with ties tucked into waistbands. The shoes were brogues, sometimes backless. There were suits, coats, and skirts in an attractive diagonalized hybrid of house check and rowing stripe, and lots more suits in a straightforward rowing stripe whose dull putty color wouldn’t have passed muster for a second in Henley proper. There were some okay strapless cotton jumpsuits, including a closing example whose wide-cut plissé legs rucked deeply inelegantly, just where you don’t want them too, and some prettily applied floral patterns on pale purple shirting and in some white-on-white embroidery.

The dresses were a mish-mash of imagined Edwardian daywear and pre-Raphaelite sleepwear. Designer Filippo Scuffi followed a vexing instinct to give his skirts and coats two facades. So a perfectly pleasant thick linen double-breasted topcoat had two panels at the back cut in plissé cotton—what’s the point of that, and how could you ever sit down?—while a wide skirt in that nice diagonalized check/stripe was similarly scuppered. The menswear was about as authentic as Dick Van Dyke’s accent in Mary Poppins, all boaters and Oxford bags.

You could if you were sensitive and English call this out as cultural appropriation. But given that the English have arguably been history’s most rapacious and ruthless appropriators of other people’s culture—normally we just chucked it in the back of a boat and brought it home—we probably deserve far, far worse than this so-so Daks collection.