Mads Mikkelsen closed today’s Zegna show, held in a vast industrial space where a field of linen blades was replicated in copper, varnished a sunny shade of sentiero yellow. “It’s the color of the fields in Normandy when the linen crops are ready to be harvested,” explained Alessandro Sartori, evoking images of romantic countryside landscapes in the summer heat.
The Danish actor of Hannibal fame was part of a cast that included non-professional models of different generations, some of them handsomely grown-up. Sartori said he wanted to explore the plurality of Zegna’s customers, who “are interpreters of the same aesthetic identity through their own individuality.” It telegraphed an attitude of overture and release from Sartori, who has been committed with utmost dedication to the reset of the label’s sartorial language.
The collection had a nuance of sensuality that was “quintessentially Italian, a certain idea of Italian elegance in the ’60s,” a feel for lightness and insouciance that seemed to break away from Sartori’s disciplined minimalism. He went bold with the introduction of prints, commissioning young artists to create abstract botanical motifs inspired by Oasi Zegna, rendered in the dense palette of warm, organic tones that has become the label’s signature. Transposed onto jacquard knitted jumpers tucked into high-waisted fluid pants, or onto silk shirt jackets with matching shorts, they were one of the collection’s eye-catching highlights.
Sartori has translated traditional suiting into a luxe version of sportswear, and has given workwear an elaborate, rich new identity. His work is about hybridization of the highest refined order, with a constant tension in reducing the categories of masculine dressing and finding new solutions to liberate classics from the weight of their codes. Definitely an innovator, Sartori is constantly challenging himself (and his company) to redefine the way men of means, culture, and sophistication approach the act of self-presentation. He tirelessly experiments with new fabrications: This season he introduced a never-seen-before linen that is rendered crease-less through a manual sanding treatment. He’s inventive with construction: a jacket in dense suede in a beautiful golden tobacco shade was impeccably unlined and deconstructed, assembled in a way that can make it easily disassembled to be regenerated, “giving it a sustainable longer life,” he explained.
On the same note of intelligent design, 90% of the sportswear in the collection was made with lining matching the fabric of the garment—linen was lined with linen, cotton lined with cotton. The smallest detail, like the newly introduced notchless collar, got the same laser-sharp attention and full dedication Sartori devotes to solving complex construction conundrums. “Everything I do is because I am in love with clothes,” he said. “I couldn’t do it if I wasn’t.”
