Lawrence Steele is in an amazing gig that puts him in a tricky position. The gig is amazing because the brief is to progressively evolve Aspesi’s long established canon of highly refined clothing classics: a canon he has been involved in shaping for around 25 years. What makes it tricky is the conundrum of raising an attention-attracting seasonal hue and cry about a project that will never change dramatically. As he put it: “We don’t do themes and it’s not a fashion brand. And I like Aspesi exactly as it is. This puts me in the position of talking about how it’s about standards, and how we make pieces that you can come back to again and again, and the philosophy here of fine-tuning your wardrobe.”
He’s right—this hardly reads as pulse-racing stuff. These are clothes built not for empty consumer calories spent on the fleeting sugar rush of acquisition, but for a high value investment that generates the slow release of pleasure that comes with sustained wearing. Steele’s current thinking is to showcase Aspesi’s broad selection on a broad selection of intimately linked people: a mother and daughter and their respective male partners (as well, in a cameo, on Steele himself). This shows the versatility of the items and suggests that rather than being signifiers of difference in themselves—look-at-me pieces—they are more pedestals that allow character to be exhibited. If the Aspesi canon is going to remain essentially itself, that ongoing here-and-there of minor seasonal evolution aside, it seems that Steele’s job is less about designing new clothes than it is designing a system to attract the engagement of new people with the brand. Because once they’re through the door, you can’t imagine them willingly exiting.
