“Before you leave,” said Brunello Cucinelli, “you really should try some rigatoni.” The sprawling buffet of regional specialities—culturally and regionally specific masterpieces of Italian cuisine, not ersatz foreign appropriations à la Chicago-style pizza or vodka sauce—that Cucinelli lays on at this presentation is almost as delicious as his cashmere is lustrous. His clothes are also profoundly localized: every stitch and seam steeped in the arcadian corporate culture he has built in Solomeo, Italy. Yet that s not to say Cucinelli doesn’t have his own more widely foraged references. “When I was young, Jil Sander was really my reference. And Yohji Yamamoto, Giorgio Armani . . . I have followed their steps.”
It makes sense that a man so widely read in philosophy would be as receptive to the didactic potential of the greats in his own metier, who, like Cucinelli, are essentially concerned with defining a harmonic language in clothing. In this collection, Cucinelli applied some renovations to his own womenswear architecture, starting with the foundations. For the first time in memory, his models wore heels—chisel-toe boots, mostly—rather than menswear-sourced flats. He also kept his palette mostly confined to a broad monochrome of white to beige and black, with the only exceptions in chestnut corduroy, leathers, and the knit relief in 20-artisan-hour handmade sweaters. He said: “I think that after three or four years with a lot of pattern and color, there is a desire to go back to solids. . . . We all need harmony as human beings, and this harmony, I think, is also mirrored in clothing.” Ever-accented by his Monili-chain, sparkle-beaded, signature motif, this was a collection of long-cooked, lightly tweaked, richly flavored, slow womenswear that hailed unmistakably from the Cucinelli Denominazione d’Origine Protetta.
