Walking into tonight’s Canali presentation felt not unlike blithely entering the living room of a family whose house you are a weekend guest at immediately after some stormer of a family bust-up. For while there were lots of smiles and assurances that everything was fine, it was clear that something pretty serious had gone down.
First of all, Hyun Wook Lee, the design director presented by communications chief Elisabetta Canali last season as the new broom here, had been, well, swept away, gone after three months. (That’s faster than Justin O’Shea at Brioni.) Not only that, but Elisabetta was absent too.
Family business is family business—private, even when your family happens to an extremely public and greatly respected fashion company that invites nosy parkers like yours truly to interrogate its wares twice a year. It’s not for us to delve. But of course I delved. Stefano Canali, general manager of the business, stoically characterized the changes as evolution—an excellent byword for revolution.
The third, less spectacular, shift evident was that Canali had returned to Pitti, the true home of industrialized Italian sartorial-ism, after its long and mixed bag of shows in Milan. This is probably a good idea. This wonderful company has long been in need of a reset, not due to any great fault of those who run it, but to reflect the shifting tides of taste that have threatened it so profoundly recently.
There’s not much point in going into the garments shown tonight in this report. The lustrousness of a lavender cashmere jacket cannot compare with the shift in the fabric of Canali’s operation that became semi-evident this evening. Here’s hoping that any pain that prefaced that shift will be soon be eclipsed by pleasure. Change often hurts at first, but it can be for the best.
