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.

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.
 
Federico named the collection “Assunta and Giacomo,” after his two grandparents who passed away last year.

“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.
 
Just like Federico Cina.