New season, new design director. Norbert Stumpfl is in, Nina-Maria Nitsche is out. Stumpfl, Austrian by origin, was previously design director under Haider Ackermann at Berluti (replacing Aldo Maria Camillo), prior to which he rolled with with Kim Jones at Louis Vuitton (during the Supreme moment), which followed a stint at Balenciaga that came after his formative nine years working alongside Lucas Ossendrijver at Lanvin. Stumpfl said: “Lucas was my teacher. He taught me everything about fabrics and cuts—he is a real designer.” And so say all of us.
That education became apparent as Stumpfl toured us through his first-season panoply of luxury menswear, highlights of which included a greatcoat with crocodile under-collar in a robust, floury finished camel cashmere wool mix; suede and leather shirts and pants with a new, near-invisible seaming technique involving a complicated bias-cut stitch; a check seersucker suit so pared-down that the jacket weighed just 340 grams; Japanese denim lined with cotton checks; silk-paisley-lined soft-shouldered cashmere jackets; a cashmere and wool hoodie lined in shaved mink; Norwegian shoes in cordovan leather (the bit from the horse’s ass) handmade in the waterproof veldtschoen construction; and knit Astrakhan jackets and gilets over cashmere cotton track pants—plus a sweetly Astaire-ish tailed evening suit and a very Prince Harry morning suit.
Although everything on Stumpfl’s mannequins was precious—and will undoubtedly be priced as such—that preciousness did not seem wedded to an insistence on delicacy. You could imagine these clothes looking even better after a bit of real-life roughing-up.
As the softly spoken Stumpfl entirely failed to suppress his excitement about this new gig at Brioni—“Being here is just a dream; the materials you can work with are incredible . . . the fabrics are spectacular”—I kept looking at the neckline of his sweater. Up out of it, a striped Nehru collar was peeking on the left side, but seemed to have fallen below on the left. Was this on purpose, or a minor wardrobe malfunction? “It doesn’t matter! It’s all about sprezzatura, that very Roman thing—you wear all these amazing clothes but once you have them on, you just don’t care.” Brioni’s recent existential agonies make Sartre look well adjusted, but if the house can give Stumpfl a fair go—a tenure that lasts a few years rather than a few months—it might rediscover its confidence and move on with a new robustness.
