The grand tour was an early ancestor of today’s mass tourism. This 18th century-onward trend was a way for the monied classes in Europe’s chilly north to venture south to Italy and Greece to broaden their cultural horizons and get away from their parents. This season Brunello Cucinelli and his team flipped that template to make Italy not the destination but the starting point. These clothes charted a journey from Solomeo in Umbria—the epicenter of Cucinelli’s culture—and continued farther south.
In truth, of course, this journey was entirely imagined: Every apparent souvenir was handmade in Italy. What the story line allowed team Cucinelli to play with, however, were the contrasts between the classical structures of his tailoring and more conventional womenswear with the wilder, organically evolved output of his team of knitwear artisans. Exceptional bags and tops were fashioned in fluid sproutings of tobacco-toned macramé yarn in which were integrated metal-set chains of colored stone. There was a dress apparently made of macramé chain. Hand meshed knits were weblike and entirely irregular. These items were real trophies.
Against them were placed sleeveless safari jackets, panamas, clubbishly striped suiting, gauze cotton animalia skirts, cable knits, some cool Monili-tassled suede moccasins, and shirting with metal-embroidered linen cuffs. These pieces were all entirely lovable, but it was the experiments in knitwear—Cucinelli’s founding metier—that were most worth writing home about.
