The bark chips on the floor of Z Zegna’s birch-filled Pitti pavilion sure tossed up a lot of dust—apparently, the Zegna staff has been vacuuming overtime—yet they played a key illustrative part in a collection dedicated to the vast area of mountainous nature reserve around the company’s north Italian base. That park, the Oasi Zegna, was formally founded in 1993 as the culmination of a series of environmental projects begun by Zegna’s founder, Ermenegildo Zegna, back in the 1930s. Thanks to him, the inhabitants of Trivero have long been blessed with plenty of Alpine landscape to freely wander (or ski) through.
The tailored and the technical overlapped via looks that mixed formal shapes and sportswear in a collection colored in tones drawn from the Oasi and styled to be ready to explore it. Quilted jackets with inbuilt chest protectors were worn over French corduroy plus fours, hearty woolen socks, and delicately robust hiking boots. Tailored topcoats or tweed blousons were shown over more quilting, plus webbing harnesses slung with pockets—handy for the man who likes to sacrifice storage to keep the shape of his outerwear. Casentino-finish overcoats and tapered pants in Irish wolfhound gray, leaf-green brown, or snow white were sometimes lined with quilted inserts to deliver the insulation and comfort their handsome fluffiness signaled; that coat in Look 28, especially, appeared as a wearable oasis long worth lingering in. At the front of the presentation were some heavier, extra-fine flannel examples of the fully washable suit introduced by the company last summer, and to its back was a capsule of sportswear pieces and sneakers in the proprietary Techmerino material, inspired by an old in-company fitness club. In a collection so dedicated to healthy living and outdoorsmanship, the unstinting lustrousness of its fabrication sometimes smacked incongruously of decadence, but this was a virtuous, clean-living decadence.
