When Kris Van Assche traveled to the Berluti factory in Ferrara, Italy, he was still trying to get a fix on what might become the thematic algorithm—the heart—of his first runway show for the brand he joined last April. And then he saw it: the huge square marble table at which Berluti’s artisans sit to apply dye and polish up the patina of the shoes for which this 1895-founded company is so renowned. Struck not only by the creamy deep whiteness of the marble, but the circles and blotches left by years’ worth of lovingly applied polishes—flecks of pink and blue and orange and green and red—Van Assche knew he had stumbled upon the key with which to unlock his new iteration of Berluti.
“I totally, totally love the contrast of the noble and the rough. So we photographed it, and it became a print on the silk shirts, suits, and coats—we didn’t retouch it at all. And all those colors provided the palette for the rest of the collection,” Van Assche explained. To show how fundamental he feels the patina is, the designer’s first look was a hand-cut suit in patinated brown leather. The technique used to apply the richly layered fluctuating densities of color was different to that used on a Berluti shoe—say an Alessandro or an Andy—because on the suit it would have stained the clothing worn beneath it. Both through his use of color drawn from the stains on the patina table and this first suit, Van Assche was building a connection between the accessories upon which Berluti was founded and the clothes he now becomes the third designer charged with producing.
Like Haider Ackermann before him, Van Assche populated this show—the only exclusively masculine house in the LVMH group—with plenty of women. With the exception of a rib-knit dress in complementary shades of blue, women-worn outfits were variations of the menswear. The final looks, simultaneously presented on both genders, were a brace of black suits: Van Assche is Van Assche. Unlined kangaroo-hide trenches, some a rich red russet, some a soft throbbing fluctuation of several colors—plus a great astrakhan-effect gray shearling, a black croc bomber, and several leather hoodie and track pant looks—supplied the powerfully animal accent you’d expect from a house that stands on its heritage in leather.
Paneled moto pants stamped with the year of the company’s founding were worn beneath table-print shirting and strong-shouldered, tailored jackets or overcoats in some of the brightest tones in the kaleidoscope. Often these came with leather shoe tassels attached to the lapel by a safety pin brooch. A gray leather trenchcoat over a charcoal city suit and a dark gray suit in a jacquard of irregular black clouds were looks in which Van Assche explored a darker aspect of patina.
The shoes, all important, were bold adaptations of the Alessandro, radically sliced to produce an irregular chisel-toe shape, often emphasized with metal plates that shined under the spotlights, another play on patina. White sneakers came in the same shape. The stealth submarine toe shape was reflected in the molded leather bags—richly patinated, naturally—slung across many of the looks here.
This first in-the-wild display of Berluti 3.0—the Van Assche update—explored a series of interesting dialectics: between the shine and depth of patina, between the differences and overlaps in accessories and clothing; and between the expressively idiosyncratic appeal of the brand’s core products and its position in a highly formalized luxury menswear sector.
