If you didn’t know that Brunello Cucinelli has a 12th Century hamlet in the hills of Umbria where all its clothes are made – you should really check it out. If “the Italian dream” could be a place, Solomeo is probably it, upholding the integrity on time-honed design and creating a community around skilled, reliable and beautiful craftsmanship.
It’s an apt vernacular to associate with this SS21 collection, which features a raffia and sequinned jacket that takes 20 hours to make, hand-knitted macramé cardigans that took a whopping 40 hours and an edit of linen and jute short suits that are so expertly made they are bound to last a lifetime. The words the brand chose to summarise its spring/summer 2021 aesthetic are “comfort, calm and gracefulness” which are as palpable as ever.
The beauty of a brand like Brunello Cucinelli is that it doesn’t try to reinvent the wheel each season but update it with a new mood, so next season features the brand’s signature natural palette updated with fabrics that create a contrast “between raw and polished surfaces” – which translates to lamé, metallic and sequinned accents throughout. As with most of the collections we’ve seen so far in Milan, the tension between smart and casual is diffused – clever given we find ourselves somewhere in between at the moment when it comes to work and play. Clothes that are as comfortable to Zoom in as they are to take tentative steps back into the office next Spring are a winning combination right now. If they bring a bit of Brunello Cucinelli’s Italian dream into either of those equations, then all the better.
Photographs courtesy of Brunello Cucinelli.