As a soccer player, Brunello Cucinelli's favorite position was central defenseman, and he especially admired the no-prisoners-taken technique of Nobby Stiles: "He was small, but he was very strong—bruto!—and he left his opponents no room to move." Now 61, Cucinelli's soccer days are done—he feels playing would be as inappropriate as wearing his new favorite distressed-wash Japanese jeans without a blazer above them—but he patrols the territory his business has defined for itself with ferocious energy. Even his translator (and she is very, very fast) can sometimes barely keep up with him.
"We are experiencing a beautiful momentum," Cucinelli said in his showroom today. "We expect a beautiful 2015, scoring and delivering a double-digit growth. More and more strongly we feel that the taste for lightweight, chic, and sporty is spreading." This he stated flanked by a phalanx of models dressed in this season's variation of Total Cucinelli. The marquee signings were the aforementioned Japanese denim, a new fuller-thigh-but-tapered-at-the-calf, one-pleat trouser shape, and some sporty slogan shirts that exalted harmony of body and mind in Latin or displayed the skyline of Cucinelli's Solomeo nerve center. But the engine of this proposition remained the tailored jacket: over T-shirt and knit, over high-V tee (never deep), over suede gilet with shirt and tie, under biker, under gilet…mix and match ad infinitum. Cucinelli inhabits a parallel universe in which all men have perfectly disordered hair and chuck their soccer gear into handmade canvas and calfskin kit bags. Underpinning this fantasy are clothes, shoes, and accessories that emanate an institutional wholesomeness and are spectacularly well made. Quality kit.
