“Tailoring, tailoring, tailoring, everywhere. That is what we do. It has to be tailoring. It’s us; what we are and what we want to be.” Pre-show, Elisabetta Canali wasn’t reining back her 1900-employee family company’s dedication to the sartorial. And the collection itself, the first post Andrea Pompilio’s exit after a two-year tenure, was also deeply invested in the traditional attire of alpha man. The models emerged from a cat’s cradle of rope meant to evoke weaving, which was also reminiscent of the wonderful poster for Hitchcock’s Vertigo. The show opened and closed with jackets of a fil-on-fil fabric—malfilei, Canali called it—in which you could see the competing and pleasingly organic jumble of warp versus weft. There was a mighty series of softly colored suits (dusty blues, terracotta ochres) that gently stretched the house Kei jacket by inserting secondary pocket-square pockets at the hip. These suits were worn over double-layered knits rucked half up at one side, and there was plentiful use of the sub-collar neckerchief.
So that was the tailoring, and it was lovely. But there was plenty of more diverse luxury attire too: bombers with bodies of perforated leather and knit arms, long light trenches, leather M65s, and double-hemmed Bermuda shorts. The narrative of tailoring has always been one of minor navigational adjustments on a long-range journey to match the changing tastes of the men it outfits. Today there is also demand for a counterbalance of that which isn’t tailored at all. It’s a brave new world, and Canali is adapting.
