Alessandro Sartori has a big vision for the house of Ermenegildo Zegna—and we will see its latest iteration at this Friday’s much pondered “phygital” show—but he is also a warp and weft geek, a relisher of nanodetails. This aspect of him was apparent in our Z Zegna appointment.
For a change it was held on Google Hangouts. On the other side of the screen Sartori informed me that this collection was inspired by Oasi Zegna, the nature reserve founded near the company’s base in Trivero, Italy, nearly 30 years ago. On the showroom’s walls was installed a collage of images of it, from wide-angled woody panoramas to macro moss-scapes, all shot by and overlaid with filters by Mattias Klum. These research pieces provided the prints, and the color palette.
We rattled through the diversity of the offer in Zegna’s TechMerino™, treated wool that allows you to chuck It suits or technical sneakers in your washing machine. We paused to ooh over a jacket in waterproof leather as thin as paper. Then Sartori’s cadence quickened as we got to the nitty-gritty. We considered a sporty field jacket, slightly checked, that Sartori said was a mixture of recycled linen and nylon.
Then there was a section of entirely recycled pieces under the label #UseTheExisting. Sartori said: “Now we are working with reclaimed wool, nylon, and cotton, and out of it we have done a full wardrobe.” The unintended consequence of this environmentally minded mixture, he said, “is that the new fabrics we get out, the ones we recycled are different, very resilient…so what you touch is a totally new feeling. And this is very interesting, because what we see is the more we go with research and the more we collect different techniques, we notice that we have a lot of new possibilities of working. These are fabrics with new characteristics.”
Category-wise, this offering was as broad as the Oasi ecosystem, from ski parkas to cycling shorts via tailoring to early Armani-esque blousons in technical fabric and a much fancied multi-pocketed action jacket especially lovely in bushfire orange. But it’s at that nanolevel where the pursuit of technology in the service of nature is starting to bear unexpectedly luxurious fruits for Sartori. In a future where the process of manufacturing will be as important to the customer as its end product, this can only bode well for ZZegna.
