Zegna’s got a new look. Well, not quite. Throughout the pandemic, Alessandro Sartori has quietly been re-engineering the brand – armed with a design vocabulary that’s informed by extreme comfort and fluidity. Like the last three seasons, the brand skipped staging a real-life catwalk show in favour of a fashion film, though this time a via phygital experience, with Milano fashion goers invited to an IRL premiere at Zegna HQ, where Sartori talked through key pieces, worn by a small gaggle of models behind him.
The press conference style of questioning that followed allowed the designer to speak of his various fine-tunings. First being, he’s chopped Ermenegildo from the brand’s official title. Going forward, all garments will be labelled just Zegna, in an archive-inspired typeface that lies beneath an oblong orange box perforated with a black line. The design symbolises a path worth taking; a road known as 232 which runs through the mountains in Piedmont, Northern Italy, owned by the brand’s founder. “[The road] echoes our founder’s essential truth of hoping to weave the fabric of a tomorrow that feels worthy of our dreams,” reads the show notes.
As was the case for the film, which saw models trekking across that very same road, high in the Italian mountains, wearing what Sartori defines as the “new suit” – swapping stuffy tailoring for three refined staples: a jacket, an underpinning and trousers (either grazing the ankle or pooled over neoprene-infused leather boots). Shoulders were left rounded and removed of padding. Lightweight fabrics collided with outerwear construction and sublime tailoring technique. The look, he says, comes from the youth’s desire to be stylised from the moment they buy a piece (or in this case, three, particularly striking when all rendered in a palette of aubergine and muddy oranges). Elsewhere, coats with popped collars and ripstop anoraks proved highlights, alongside machine washable knits that appeared ripped apart, then hand-sewn back together again. Easy to wear clothes, made with mammoth ideas.
Photography courtesy of Zegna.
