The thread that runs through Kiton is red. Since its late 1960s founding by Ciro Paone, this Neapolitan tailoring house has marked its soft-shouldered confections with the slightest of labels, the filo rosso scarlet stitch applied by its 500 tailors. At this refreshingly dynamic (relatively) presentation, Ciro’s daughter Maria Giovanna brought up a group of those tailors to demonstrate some of the processes behind the construction of one of her family firm’s famous red-etched jackets to a guest list of around 400.
That meant that not all the looks you see here were in situ there, which in the case of the wide-whale corduroy, double-breasted jacket worn with delicately tapered and cuffed pants, was the source of some regret. What remained, however, was well worth rustling on the rail. At the front of the ground-floor room were a coat and jacket in vicuna, which to the touch felt like a gentle gust of wind. Fox- or chinchilla-collared cabana coats, and coats and shift dresses in two types of netted metal-strafed boucle produced by a Scottish firm near Elgin were both strikingly mid-century but also imaginable in upscale milieus of today. Suits of cashmere, robe coats, skirts, and jackets in a soft blue or green were irreproachable. A black silk cady tux featured a lapel of gleaming black pins and five layers of organza cut to frame the neck with maximum mysterious drama. Kiton’s soft-shouldered jackets, so famous in menswear for being shirt-like in their lightness when worn but substantially formal when looked at, were expressed in carefully curated houndstooth and checks. The more informal pieces were left to the look book but will doubtless have been just as carefully crafted before the red thread’s affirmatory application.
