New human experiences demand new words to describe them and new garments in which to experience them. Last summer at Zegna, Alessandro Sartori used the term phygital to describe his house’s first foray into a hybrid show format that compensated for the lack of IRL with a massively amplified online articulation. Although Sartori acknowledged in a preview this week that the portmanteau has been used before—“in photography and software”—he added that the term felt fit-for-purpose to describe a new form of show “in which for the majority of people who would not have been at the show physically there is a lot more to see and understand.”
While phygital has since been widely adopted across the industry, it is not the only Zegna-driven innovation Sartori is plotting to place in fashion’s vernacular. Hand in hand with this updating of the texts and yarns of his house’s storytelling vocabulary, he is working to shape a new menswear dialect that fits a reshaped world. That world was evoked in a film showing his models walking through various landmarks of “New” Milan, including Piazza Olivetti, the new Bocconi campus, and Zegna’s own HQ.
Just like the architecture in which they were framed, the clothes on show were hyper-contemporary yet contained echoes of past forms; some jackets in suede or felted cashmere bore lapels split at the collarbone, or pockets cut on the hip. Fine knit or even nylon turtlenecks—loose at the throat to create a fresh substitute for the shirt collar and consign to history the tie—had buttonable cuff details.
These details were nods to a lineage of traditional tailoring that increasingly seems relegated to habit and history, yet the philosophy of tailoring was refreshed and applied to forms once deemed beyond it. Chore coats, updated leisure suits, and softened outwear—often with slit sides to allow the hands to nestle in cozy internal pockets—will all be offered on a made-to-measure basis for men and women. Like the single shoe style of the collection—a rubber-sole, shearling-lined slipper—these garments were built to service a post-pandemic world in which business life is expanded beyond the office to the home, or as Sartori put it, “a world where the indoor and the outdoor are colliding.” The indoor world was shown via a studio set of 12 open-wall rooms in which the models lived their best Zegna lives, sometimes connected, sometimes apart.
To reflect Sartori’s collision, traditional tweeds were presented in sportswear-informed full looks. The canonical pattern of houndstooth was reproduced and in sections distorted on jacquard outerwear and knitwear as a graphic nod to the accelerated unraveling of long-entrenched ways of living and working. Sportswear was further luxurified, but not made precious, in some outrageous but highly wearable shearling sweatpants. A high-neck sleeveless gray tabard in felted cashmere was a workwear-reminiscent buffer garment that you could see making the jacket redundant.
The striped jacquard wool suit and overcoat and many of the cashmere jersey pieces were in line with the Zegna “Use the Existing” policy of presenting its collections in fabrics made from materials recovered during the manufacturing process, a philosophy that is continuously being expanded in partnership with house suppliers to apply right down to shoe linings. Other items, like a long green coat in quilted suede or oversized sweaters decorated with stitched leather, might have been entirely new to existence yet demanded to be worn into vintage old age.
Sartori and his team called this collection “The (Re)Set”: It represented an ambitious refiguring for a house that is working to coin the clothes of the future rather than rely on the return of past habits.
