Italo Zucchelli thought of his latest exercise in Calvin Klein-hood as one of his West Coast collections. He called it Graphic Heatwave, his main motif was inspired by defining L.A. artist Ed Ruscha's palm trees, and he also abstracted a "surf's-up" wave on T-shirts. But Zucchelli gave short shrift to any notion of a sun-kissed salute to classic American sportswear. Bright sunlight, after all, creates harsh shadows. So Frédéric Sanchez's soundtrack featured the industrial grind of '80s bands Ministry, Skinny Puppy, and Nitzer Ebb, and the models had an eerie clonelike quality, and they were all wearing sandals and socks, and somehow that all added up to trouble in paradise.
Though Zucchelli is a rigorous formalist, with substantial tailoring the foundation of all his collections, he is also provokingly experimental when it comes to menswear. Here, he was intrigued by the idea of "roundness," so many of the models had a circle of fabric attached at the waist, like an odd belt. It didn't make a hell of a lot of sense, but Zucchelli, famously minimalist in his approach to design, had been musing over ways to inject a little maximalism into his work. Hence that superfluous circle. He met more success with the pieces whose Velcro-ed pockets could be positioned at will. Now that seemed more useful, and a bit maximal too.
Something else Zucchelli is mesmerized by is the possibilities of fabric. Technology is his friend. With this collection, he made a jacquard of stone-washed denim, such an accurate looky-likey that you'd be completely fooled into thinking you were looking at a jacket and jeans from the 1970s wardrobe of Jan-Michael Vincent or Willie Aames. Zucchelli paired them with a white poplin tee, just about the most classically minimal menswear combination you could imagine. Except it wasn't, because the denim was an illusion. That too was provoking. Why?, one wonders.
Because I can, the other answers.
