It’s all about connection. By far the most affecting shows so far this season—Charles Jeffrey’s Loverboy and Art School in London, Sansovino 6 in Florence—found life by presenting their clothes as the circuitry that connects community. At Sibling, another great label powered by the same spirit, the idea that our raiments are the first line of mutual attraction and sympathy is fundamental right down to the name.
Tonight in Milan, Alessandro Sartori presented the first truly epically scaled show of this season. Perhaps only Chanel at the last gasp of womenswear will compete. Held in a ridiculously cavernous hangar on the edge of Milan that hosts the German artist Anselm Kiefer’s sinisterly decrepit installation citadel The Seven Heavenly Palaces, this was a show venue that dwarfed human scale pathetically. It made you feel small.
To pretty much that same scale Ermenegildo Zegna dwarves all the aforementioned labels—it is the planet’s largest luxury menswear brand, a billion-dollar-plus entity. This made the parallel endeavors to connect that Sartori undertook tonight all the more impressive. Inherently less intimate in nature, Sartori’s project was to unify two, far larger, inchoate communities; the company and the customer.
Zegna is a—possibly the—luxury brand defined by tailoring. Its last creative director, Stefano Pilati, presented gorgeous geek-out couture shows that bore but scant relation to the philosophy of the whole. He was a designer despite his label, not from it. Thus the first healing of tonight was to reunify Zegna. The natural colorways of undyed wool and cashmere, turmeric orange, olive green, vicuna brown, soft pastels, and purples all bore purposefully the shared palette of the Z Zegna show shown in Florence. The ski pants and mountain boots here were a reaching out to that hitherto marginalized label in the Z family.
This was connection part 1: internal business. Part 2 was far trickier. Right now, the suit is not synonymous with wanting to be part of a community, but having to be. Its time is fading. It is the costume of presidents, not people. But Zegna is a suiting brand, inherently. How to square that circle?
The first look was sports/streetwear and the last was a frock coat: new to old. In between, models in their 40s walked alongside models in their 20s to present a Sartori curated ideal of what could bring different generations of man together rather than define them as apart. Which is taste.
Sartori is a geek, whose life since childhood has been invested in fabric and finish. So here we saw paper-thin, vegetable-waxed calf leathers in softly cinched trenches, shaved wool-alpaca on deep purple and aubergine jackets, bobbled cashmere base blanket-like fabric on bombers and track-pants, quilted down-filled wool used on attenuated suiting, and rich jacquards (Chanel-ish not in scale, but in richness) on pants and on the bodies of quilted leather armed coats. Phew. The personal connection was both in the craft demanded to create them, and the inter-generational shared language of the sihouettes and pieces they were forged into. Sartori imported footwear nous from his last gig at Berluti in some fine herringbone soled sneakers, which reflected both the often-tripped-over floor decoration of the space and a few herringbone suits on show, with rough-stitched leather panels.
All that geekiness though, was not in isolation or for the sake of itself. It was to build a collection. For neither the old nor the young, and about togetherness rather than separation, this was an unusual luxury-industry expression of inclusivity over exclusivity. These were clothes—if you could afford them, of course—that might make you feel part of something.
