Lessico Familiare is a merry band of four Italians—Riccardo Scaburri, Alice Curti, and Alberto Petillo (who met as students and launched the label in 2020), along with the image director and newest member Victoria Genzini—who don’t just talk about change in fashion, but walk the walk. Winner of Vogue Italia and Alta Roma’s 2022 Who Is on Next? Franca Sozzani Award, the label work with upcycled and found materials to create imaginative worlds and one-of-kind-garments. The brand is now under the wing of the Sozzani Foundation, where it presented today and in 2023; last season Sunnei lent the label space to show. Going into year five, the brand is starting to get some traction in retail with stockists in Japan that, Scaburri noted on a call, “understand our poetry” and a recent installation at Dover Street Market Paris.
The brand name, Lessico Familiare, is adapted from Lessico Famigliare (Family Sayings), a 1963 novel by Natalia Ginzburg, and the label’s work stays closes to home in the sense that it often makes use of (familiar) home textiles and furnishings. This season’s work is titled Abecedario (the Alphabet), and the idea was that the letters would be the models. “Every single letter is going to have an object, a color, a movie, a character, a dress that belongs to our world,” Scaburri said. Only a half dozen or so of the letters are garments; the rest are physical objects and photographs of flea markets finds. All of these, plus commissioned text, have been gathered together into a small book (see the pages below).
“I hope people will understand it. I don’t want them to think that it’s just a table full of objects; I want them to understand that the alphabet is the runway and the letters are going to be our cast,” Scaburri said. “If a stylist asks us for Look No. 6 (which is F), they are going to receive an actual object. We were always thinking that one day we wanted to do something different from just garments,” the designer continued, “and since the brand started from a novel, we went back to the novel, we went back to the alphabet, to the sentences, the letters, the words, and that’s why we wanted to create our own alphabet. And in this collection, there are not just our letters; we asked Jonathan Bazzi, a young Italian writer, to write small stories about five letters.”
Fashion’s relationship to literature has been depicted in many forms over the years. Stories such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland have inspired shoots. At Gucci, for fall 2017, Alessandro Michele issued an invitation in the form of an LP with readings from William Blake and Jane Austen and designed clutches that resembled Austen novels. Kim Jones had TS Eliot’s The Waste Land read aloud at his fall 2023 Dior Men show, and Christian Dior himself is famous for giving letter names—H and Y—to his ever-changing silhouettes. This LF collection payed direct tribute to three female authors (Ginzburg, Jane Austen, and Virginia Woolf), but the team took the idea of language beyond reference point and into experience, connecting to a realm bigger than fashion. Scaburri put it this way: “I love the idea of escapism in terms of inspiration. Maybe I need to create my own bubble, but in the end this bubble, it’s in a world—you have to deal with what is happening.” This collection, he continued, is a “reflection on the importance of the words, how we use words. A good picture is no longer enough; I feel like there should be words, as well as the eye and smell, as well as the thought and the mind too.”
The runway isn’t the only, the best, nor the most business-savvy option for many brands, and the just-wrapped London Fashion Week sparked much conversation about alternative ways to show. LF seems to be arguing for more immersive experiences. This season the label broke down storytelling to its most elemental units: letters. Designwise, the team worked to amplify, adorn, and adjust materials and garments by splicing many shirts together as one or transforming a garland into a scarf. There was an armless cocoon that was once a sweater and a dress that was almost baroque in its volume and combination of fabrics. “When you see the garments, they’re well-done—it’s a shirt, it’s a dress, but at the same time it keeps that magic. I feel like it also comes from [our] independence,” said Scaburri.
The feathers in the hat of the opening look were a reference to Peter Pan, the boy who never grew up and as such maintains a sense of childhood wonder. There’s a lot of that quality in LF’s work: “We are not an algorithm,” Scaburri said. “And even if the project has grown, we haven’t compromised. I feel like that our beauty comes from freedom.” Let it ring.
