A black silk shirt in this Kilgour collection featured two intersecting grids of differently sized white dots. Was there a relationship between the two? “Of course,” replied Carlo Brandelli. “The smaller ones are a quarter of the size of the large ones—it is about working in that proportional way.”
A Vitruvian mania for the imposition of order over whim drives Brandelli’s exactitude. “I don’t like using arbitrary measures in the proportion of tailoring, because it is so exact. . . . I don’t like the way that so much design is so flimsy, and concepts are just pulled out of people’s minds. There is data to my work. I like proper ethos and theory.” His continuing mission at Kilgour is to pull down, then reconstruct some of the elements of the edifice of tailoring.
When you’re fresh out of a J.W.Anderson show, though, these innovations can seem softly spoken. To up the impact at this morning’s presentation, entitled All the Work, the room was lined with around 800 cut paper pattern pieces hooked by hanger on the rails—a visual calorie count representing the amount of work put into the 150 pieces in the collection. Conversely, only a few of those pieces were featured alongside their paper prototypes.
Brandelli focuses on the borderlines of his pieces; the collars, cuffs, and pockets. Instead of being folded over, his notch collars are inverted to appear as if protruding from beneath the jacket above. Pocket openings—sometimes backed with Alcantara—are also calibrated to trick the eye: The flaps are tucked inside but look as if they are not. The result is a cleaner silhouette accompanied by the detail the regarding eye expects—a stencil of the standards that this designer is interrogating. His shawl-collar overcoats in flecks-of-gray cashmere-alpaca mix and a black version that Brandelli rightly feels is as appropriate for upscale evening events as for low-key days, are paragon examples of his urge to elide the extraneous. Even the most puritan minimalist sometimes parties hard though: For him a half double-breasted jacket in gold lamé came with a collar line that zigzagged strikingly down the body. This was consistent with Brandelli’s pare-it-down priority to present meaningful minimalism for the formal dresser.
