This week Canali at its URL launched Anthology, a nicely curated deep dive of content that excavates every aspect of this 86-year-old family business’s ups and downs. During that time Canali has faced three moments of extreme crisis: first when it was founded in 1934 by Giacomo and Giovanni Canali because the closure of a local cotton mill left them and 2,000 others without employment, the second when war left their business and infrastructure destroyed, and the third when the raincoats the business had become based on fell out of favor in the late 1960s and it pivoted to tailoring.
So does 2020 represent the fourth crisis in Canali’s history? As third-generation keeper of the flame, president and CEO Stefano Canali characterized this torrid year thus: “COVID-19 and the events of this year have for us only accelerated a change that was already underway.” By that he means a new-gen reprise of crisis three: a shift in menswear taste that is prompting the company, once again, to adapt in order to flourish.
Specifically, that has meant the division of Canali’s offer into a three-pronged proposition designed to appeal to menswear’s fractured and shifting demographics. Canali’s Black Edition is effectively hybridized and often tailored high-class sportswear, whose key innovation this season was a jacket cut in a springy linen-cotton-silk-wool mix with an apparently tailored collar that flared at the neck to form a cowl-meets-hood. Like the shacket in its 1934 heritage label offer (the second seasonal Canali innovation, although previously a garment well explored by British workwear firms such as Private White V.C.), this jacket combined both the appearance of construction while affording the full freedom of movement that a yielding fabric and lack of traditional tailoring tricks can afford. Field jackets were part of a traditionally un-Canali emphasis on military tailoring and looked good. Sportswear pieces cut in panels of dark teal suede and panels of meshed technical fabric were yet more previously off-their-grid explorations.
Tailoring was not totally relegated to the past (in fact the house’s made-to-measure market has remained robust for those captains of industry and politics who cannot ever change uniform), but the Core capsule was loosened, lightened, and expressed in a novel luxury synthetic blend that those two founding grandfathers of the house would have been astonished by.
Along with retail expansion in rebounding China, these new lines and the Anthology project are key pillars in the house’s unfolding strategy. Stefano Canali said: “We believe that the optimistic message hidden in this story of ours is that if you have a plan, and if you have the courage to pursue your goals, and if you have the means to do so, then you can succeed.”
