Even before news leaked that Stefano Pilati was designing a capsule for Zara, close watchers of the Berlin-based, Italian-born designer knew something was coming. On Instagram, Pilati had been engaging in a sort of comeback tour, posting images of past runway shows, red carpet moments, and advertising campaigns from his days at YSL, where he was creative director from 2004 to 2012, and reminiscing about their creation.
Now, the day is here: the reveal of a collection of clothes and accessories for women and men, which has been shot by Steven Meisel and stars Gisele Bundchen and Pilati himself.
Pilati has known Marta Ortega Perez, the chair of Inditex, Zara’s parent company, for 10 years, and says they’ve often talked about working together in the past. When the offer finally came back in January, Pilati was all-in. “I said, ‘let’s do it.’ It seemed very straightforward and fun for me. It was also a different way to approach designing from what I’m doing with Random.”
Random Identities is the gender fluid label Pilati launched in 2017, after four years designing at Zegna. In fact, Ortega Perez’s original brief was to do a men’s collection for Zara. It was to be a tribute to Pilati’s own verve with clothes, which has been long admired. In 2016, this website put him at the top of a list of the most stylish men in fashion. “To me,” Sally Singer wrote at the time, “Stefano Pilati is the epitome of fearless, intuitive elegance: always intensely masculine, but those cuts, those fabrics, the tattoos, the jewelry.”
Before long, the project’s scope grew to include womenswear. “I’ve had many women that like the way I dress over the years,” says Pilati. “I guess it’s the care I dedicate. Maybe men see it as an act of vanity, while women see it as, I don’t know, more familiar.”
There’s bound to be women who buy Pilati’s new Zara men’s looks, because they’re made very much in his spirit, especially the full pants with the exaggerated breaks, but it’s bound to go the other way too, with men buying the women’s. Pilati raves about a super-low cut pair of leather pants. “I didn’t do them for men, but I would wear them—immediately.”
Elsewhere in the lineup, a tailored black minidress has the shoulders Pilati did at Saint Laurent that were a reference that Monsieur Saint Laurent did in his ’40s collection. “It’s part of my language, what I did at Saint Laurent. It stayed with me, it’s not that I’m stuck with it; it’s part of me now.” A tailleur embroidered with strawberries is another callback to his past. “I did a collection that was about strawberries, but for example on the menswear I embroidered little bananas,” he laughs. “It’s just me.”
Who Pilati is is still evolving. Earlier this month, he announced he’s brought on a business partner to scale up Random Identities and more. “Working on Zara made me feel that perhaps I miss something that is a bit more elevated, you know, compared to what I do with Random,” Pilati said. Random is economized in terms of creativity—it’s one coat, dark fabric, boom, basta. This made me feel how much I enjoy to do a collection.” Pilati’s collaboration with Zara arrives in stores around the world and online next Thursday, October 3. Prices range from $17.90 to $399.
