Berluti is a labor of both love and conviction for Antoine Arnault. The only 100 percent menswear brand in the LVMH stable was purchased by Antoine’s father because he loves the shoes and is a genius agglomerator of luxury, but it was Antoine who truffled it out from noble obscurity and built it into the brand it is today—a yardstick of luxury menswear. Yet Berluti at this moment is in flux. Alessandro Sartori, the author-designer and Arnault’s confrere in the project since nearly day 1, has accepted an offer he couldn’t refuse from Gildo Zegna to be master of all ceremonies back on Via Savona. We await the anointment of his successor—gossip says it might be a female designer?—in the next couple of months.
Thus this evening Berluti hosted a fabulous interim presentation—no show—that provided the maximum pleasure of this Paris Menswear week so far. The clothes, hung diffidently in beach huts near the entrance, were lovely. There was a certain quilted navy bomber this reviewer totally went bananas for and would happily have ordered thrice. The raw denim, traced by leather accents, was sumptuous. Even a perforated leather coat in buttercup yellow seemed massively stealable.
But the clothes were not the focus tonight. This was an exhalation before the post-Sartori redefinition to come. So in a gorgeous rose-strewn garden we wandered through a pool party inhabited by abdominally gifted models. There was a soccer tournament, a pétanque competition, and a (leather) table football showdown. We fashion-based sportsmen let rip. I played ping-pong with the Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Brice Butler and totally kicked his ass. Wallpaper magazine’s Nick Vinson showed Maradona moves on the soccer pitch—in exquisite sandals by Álvaro. Robert Rabensteiner, the Italian Vogue artistic guru and owner of the best beard in fashion, displayed hitherto unsuspected credentials as a skip-rope maestro. Alex Bilmes, editor of U.K. Esquire, stared deep into a bottle of the finest French champagne and toasted the end of Great Britain’s greatness. It was sport, it was life, and it was a moment in between something gone and something to come.
