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To quote The Golden Girls great Sophia Petrillo: Picture it—laying out in the sun, a scarf tied around your hair, some sort of citrus-based spritz at arm’s reach. Ideally, this scene would play out on the Sicilian coast, but realistically—have you seen the cost of airfare?—it doesn’t have to. In fact, fashion brands are packaging the Italian vacation vibe up for us to consume anywhere and everywhere this summer. For much less than the round-trip flights.
In June, J.Crew contributed to the growing legion of fashion-hospitality crossovers by introducing a collaboration with Masseria San Domenico, a 14th-century fortified farmhouse turned luxury hotel on the coast of the Adriatic, in Italy’s Puglia region. The seven-piece capsule of beachwear and accessories, priced between $59.50 and $198, is inspired by souvenirs you might pick up on a beach vacation of your own. (A highlight is a printed silk scarf with illustrations by Joana Avillez inspired by Italy, which has become a staple in J.Crew’s destination-specific collections).
“It’s this nice expression of how we either are living or hope to live our summer,” Julia Collier, the brand’s chief marketing officer, tells Vogue. “Personally, I’m not going away this summer, and I wish I was now.”
A few members of the team had stayed at the property, and it emerged as a natural destination for capturing “that sense of ease and abandonment that you have when you re on vacation,” so says Collier. “We like to introduce our audience to places and brands that we love that they may not know about…. It’s such a special property, having this incredible pool that’s built into the cliffs and the rocks, [a] very interesting nature tie-in.”
It also ties into a frequent inspiration for J.Crew: “Olympia Gayot and Brendon Babenzien always think about the coast when they re designing for summer. We have this easiness and happiness, especially the women s collection—a lot of color and dresses and flowiness. It lent itself so perfectly to that Italian coastal vacation spirit.”
Meanwhile, in the nearby town of Castellana Grotte, Tibi has been dreaming up a capsule with Il Caroseno, a family-run group that runs a restaurant and recently opened up a guesthouse on its property, inspired by life in the region, which is priced between $415 and $695.
“What we actually ended up doing was driven by a lot of questions as to where this actually fits into not just our brand and what we create, but what [the people of Castellana Grotte] do every day as well,” says Gabriel Smilovic, the brand’s manager of strategic partnerships and new media projects. “It needed to make sense. It needed to be real and true.”
Il Caroseno has people working in the kitchen of the restaurant, picking cherries, milking cows, and crafting marble. To accurately reflect the reality of an Italian summer on a property like this one, the pieces had to be versatile. “We would’ve never done a sleeveless top or even a short sleeve top—it was so critical that the pieces be able to be wrapped around the body or draped across a dress or the sleeves pushed all the way up,” Amy Smilovic, Tibi’s founder and creative director, explains. “When you look at pictures of Italians running around in the summer, that’s what I imagine. They’ve manipulated their clothing in such a special, unique way.”
The resulting offering, launched in July, is made up of two button-down shirts, two boxer shorts, and a denim jumpsuit. “When you look at the pictures of Casa Caroseno, you certainly crave things that are very fresh and crisp,” says Amy. “The house is all of these beautiful, rich, sandy browns and creamy colors. We started out first with a palette that was really mimicking the countryside, but it didn’t feel like enough of a juxtaposition.” Instead, the brand brought in sky blues for the button-down and boxer short sets, plus some stripes for added dimension. Then, there’s a denim jumpsuit, inspired by the family’s nonna, who picks cherries in a similar uniform.
Tibi shot the lookbook on location at Il Caroseno, using the people who work there as their models. The brand’s customer responds to that rhythm of authenticity, which has become core to how it communicates. “We work hard now to explain how it is that we felt when we were there and to let people share that same experience with us,” Amy says. “It might sound so strange, but it was beautiful to be able to land in a country with no other objective than to know that you were working with someone really good and that if you just let the process unfold, it ll take you someplace interesting. When people buy Tibi, that’s a lot of what they re buying into.”
Part of the beauty of a place like Il Caroseno, Amy argues, is how every detail is thoughtful, but not overwrought: “Sometimes, when everything is so considered, it feels very overwhelming and suffocating. To have that balance of so much care with so much ease, you can t help but get there and think, ‘This is how I want to be in my life. I want things around me to be really good and beautiful, but not pretentious and difficult.’ You don’t just sit there and enjoy it—you really want to be it.”
These qualities are what draw people to Tibi, too. Amy describes the brand’s audience as “people who are very creative, but they’re grounded. They’re still pragmatic about what it takes to live life, what you need to do, and what our reality is…They very much respect heritage and what s come before us. So when you’ve got that combination of people who are very effortless and modern and appreciative of what s around them, it creates an interesting dynamic.”
The appeal of the Italian summer getaway is an evergreen source of inspiration. It’s not just an American fantasy, either: Positano’s famed Le Sirenuse has a fashion brand that’s had its own slate of collaborators, and Prada recently unveiled its latest “Days of Summer” campaign, set in Capri, with a week-long installation of pastel branded gozzo row boats floating in the Punta Carena bay.
For brands, it’s about evoking that summering with abandon spirit, even if you can’t actually be there. That’s something Collier thought about a lot at Skims, where she worked before J.Crew and which recently launched a swimwear capsule with Roberto Cavalli. It was partly inspired by Kim Kardashian’s own vacation wardrobe. “Do the clothes represent this lifestyle? Do the clothes communicate all the things that we’re talking about as a brand?” she posits. “It’s at the forefront of how Olympia thinks about the collections over the summer, and that’s really what our audience connects to, even if they’re not going away: Beautiful color, flowy dresses, straw accessories, jelly sandals.”
Summer, she reflects, is also a time when people can be a little bit more adventurous with what they wear. “People put aside their style and try new things—like, ‘Oh, maybe I could wear a jelly sandal again,’” Collier says. “I would never have worn a jelly sandal. I saw someone in the office wearing ours, and I was like, ‘Could I be that person?’ And I’m now that person.”