From a soft-furnished throne at the center of his bustling Pitti pavilion, Brunello Cucinelli surveyed the detachment of chisel-jawed and finely coiffed young gentlemen arrayed in this season’s expressions of the garments that have helped him build his kingdom. Cucinelli is a man to whom proportions in menswear are as important as proportion in architecture was to Palladio.
This season he gently refined his harmonic formula to allow for a slightly broadened jacket shape, a wider lapel, and a short-pleated pant. That rubric, while fixed, allowed for infinite combinations of mix and match. One combination saw a delicately ripped jean worn below a hand-softened T-shirt under a gray linen striped blazer, all atop a suede tasseled loafer. Another saw a mottled leather derby under a pair of tailored, superlight wool pants under a shirt and tie under a plain-colored jacket sculpted with Bernini precision. Cucinelli is passionate about tailoring—“I prefer them all to wear a jacket”—and says he sees a resurgence in interest in it among his younger clients. But he is wise enough not to put that passion over pragmatism.
Tucked in the corner of the pavilion was a garment hitherto unseen here: a white-panted, tricolor-jacketed tracksuit. Alongside it was a bomber-jacket suit with cuffed pants cut in red-striped blue superfine wool. The handsomely stained wooden shelf units included some gorgeously colored plays on the German Army sneaker and even some knit running shoes decorated with the in-Latin date of this company’s foundation. “It is less about the jogging world,” clarified Cucinelli, “but yes, there is some leisure—ennobled leisure.”
