This first show on the Milan Menswear Fashion Week schedule was shown way beyond the city limits—we’d apparently traveled halfway back to Florence barely hours after leaving it. However there was design behind the gesture—ambition in the collection that matched the scale of the journey to reach it. For the venue to which we schlepped was the titanic, rusted ribcage of the Falck iron mill, which from its foundation in 1903 to its closure in 1995 provided the raw materials that fueled much of Lombardy’s economic flourishing for companies including Olivetti and Alfa Romeo.
Today this huge site has been cleaned (so Alessandro Sartori assured us) of the long-seeping toxic chemicals in its soil and work will soon begin on a Renzo Piano envisaged redevelopment to create huge new housing capacity and a new home for the region’s cancer and neurological hospitals. The hulking superstructure in which we sat will remain as a monument—and admonishment—of 20th-century industrialism. Thus this blighted, rubble-strewn, fume-blown Mad Max-like landscape made the geographically inconvenient but thematically ideal site for this collection. That aptness was two-fold, both in substance and aesthetic.
Substance-wise, a solid 20 percent of the clothes on show were made of both nylon and wool upcycled from existing Ermenegildo Zegna waste product. According to Sartori, 20 percent of wool is lost at the spinning stage, another 20 percent at the weaving stage, and then a final 10 percent at the cutting stage. Here that wool, and off-cut nylon too, was used either to make completely new pieces or was mixed with other ‘new’ materials to make them. Sartori added that Zegna research suggests both wool and nylon can be recycled up to four times—so re-re-re-recycled—and that the company is pushing on to that. It seems certain that soon our value system will rate recycled/upcycled/carbon neutral etc. materials as more precious than those which represent ecological depletion—especially if they look as good: oldness will be the new newness.
Here, from a purely dumb fashion perspective, the upcycled items ranked by no means below those hewn from virgin materials. These included the crunchy nylon suit in look three, and the full arm-printed jackets and parkas in looks 10, 15, 29, and 31. Aesthetically, our venue was reflected in the base layer of grays, rust, and metallics that formed the underlying color story on the runway of loose black gravel. Many of the pieces were pressed during fabrication to create irregular pleats and creases that either looked drunkenly ironed or sensitively patterned, disposition depending. This irregular patterning was reflected not only in the rusting ironwork above us and the by-now widely scored tread marks on that runway, but in the print-on-print irregular grid pentimento that featured on many of the garments—the underlying aesthetic story hinted at layers of use and re-use.
In a show of such epically grand a scale, it was understandable if the smaller—but by no means less agonized over—details passed unmissed. Sartori’s new short-sleeved shirt version of his commercially successful bomber suit, his excellent three-button silk suiting, and a gorgeous faded suede top coat were amongst them. Radical change always comes with casualties, however, and the finer points in this collection will be there to pore over and enjoy in the wearing over the season—and seasons—to come.
