In Her Shoes

For SS’20, Boss’s Ingo Wilts brings clarity and the beautifully fuss-free to a chaotic world

- Andrea Sim

There is power in simplicity, and even more so in often overcomplicated times like the present. Taking place on the closing day of Milan Fashion week SS’20 — a jaunt across the Atlantic and a vacation from the brand’s usual stamping grounds, New York City — against a modest blueish-green backdrop, the Boss show and collection was a palate cleanser after Prada’s star-studded front row, and Moschino’s visual

Its chief brand officer, Ingo Wilts is now at the helm since artistic director Jason Wu parted ways with Boss three collections ago, and whose career trajectory has intertwined with the German label for the third time now. “Social media is something that is much more important than in 2008 when I left,” he says of his homecoming in 2016. It is then admirable that Wilts, in recognizing the social media trump card of having theatrics at fashion shows, is staying loyal to the Boss DNA of letting the clothing speak for themselves.

In five years, Wu had unbuttoned Boss’s strait-laced reputation — a by-product of the German label being best known for suiting up the C-suite crowd — for the ladies. And he had done so by introducing softer silhouettes, lashings of color, and perhaps most importantly, versatile ensembles that were meant to traverse all aspects of the modern woman’s life: work, recreation, and vacation. Wilts doesn’t appear to be straying too far from this formula.