Today we started our day by taking a walking fashion tour of Milan. Within the span of three streets, we passed by probably every single luxury brand on this planet, all one after the other. There was Gucci, Louis Vuitton, and so many others that it was very overwhelming to be surrounded by so many expensive things.

For the last part of our tour, we got a tour of Excelsior, a department store around the corner from the Duomo. It was six floors, with the ground floor housing “lifestyle” products like electronic gadgets and other miscellaneous things, one floor for men’s wear, three for women’s wear, and the two sub-level floors just sold food and wine. These last two floors were obviously my favorites but it was pretty cool to see the women’s fashion as well. I learned that the department store changed its displays every week which seems like a very quick turn over but the manager showing us around said this was very common in the fashion world in Italy. Unlike department stores in America that are pretty affordable like Macy’s, Excelsior was insanely expensive! Most of the clothes that I looked at ranged from 300 to 1000 euro, which makes me wonder how many Italians can actually afford to be shopping here.

After our tour, we stopped for lunch at a local hotel where we had really great risotto and what I thought was chicken but some people are saying was veal. Then, we used our free afternoon to basically window shop around the Duomo. I was tying to look for a pair of platform shoes as that seems to be a popular trend now, however, there weren’t very many stores within my price range (which seemed to be a very common theme of today!). Emily Eason bought a makeup brush at this store called Kiko – we had seen like one a day every day this trip so we decided the universe was telling us we needed to go shopping there – and had it personalized. A laser etched a sketch of the Duomo and the words Milan and Plus3 the brush within a matter of seconds, which was very cool to watch inside of this small makeup store.

For our afternoon lecture, a representative from a shoe company called Velasca came to our hotel to talk to us which was very convenient. This was probably one of the best presentations of our entire trip and it was very refreshing to hear about a company that was very different from everything we’ve seen so far. Unlike the past companies, the one is a startup company envisioned by two friends that has only been on the market for four years instead of family owned business threat has been passed down generation to generation. Also, many of the companies we saw were limited in who they were reaching either because their clients were luxury brands and/or they have very little international presence. Velasca is catering towards clients that would like quality shoes but cannot afford to spend an excessive amount of money on fashion. I thought their business model was very interesting as they are looking to bring the classic Italian style to everyone not just those who can afford to always buy Gucci and Prada.

Dinner was b far my favorite part of today because it was the funniest thing that has happened on this trip. Emily Shelby and I went to dinner by the Duomo, at a restaurant that was cat themed, called Gatto Rossa. We ordered bruschetta to start and everything was going great, until the waiter came to take away our plate. We had eaten all the bread and left the rocket salad aka the arugula on the plate because we thought it was garnish and literally four different waiters stared at us like we were crazy for not eating the plain salad and then made fun of us all night for it! All three of us were very confused as to what as happening and were pretty sure we had offended the whole of Italian culture by not eating the rocket salad.