This was the second Euro fashion show thrown in Los Angeles in the last 24 hours. “We let Hermès take the hills,” Gildo Zegna told Madeleine Schulz of Vogue Business shortly before the Italian menswear marque followed the French leather goods titan with a runway situated on the Malibu Pier. It was pretty idyllic: a wise-eyed seal stared up inquisitively from below and pelicans circled above as 500 or so mostly Zegna-clad attendees trod the weather-worn boards and took their folding picnic seats. A cluster of local surfers rode the swell offshore as the June gloom framed the canyons in a soft-focus of fog that never meaningfully threatened to roll in.
We were here on the pier for two reasons. The first was to bring Zegna’s freshest wearables straight to its second-largest market (after New York). Around 120 of the guests were VICs (half of them local) who will be invited to shop this runway (with an infinity of customization options) at the Villa Zegna event at Chateau Marmont over the next few days. The second was to add local context to la villeggiatura, a now-faded custom of decamping with your entire family to some seaside villa for the entire month of August that was de rigueur for bougie Italian clans before the advent of cheap air travel in the early 1980s.
This was the concept around which Alessandro Sartori framed his collection, while enjoying an added bonus that it gave him free rein to lavish his models with luggage (two linen and leather totes clutched by one model, two great woven carpet bag grips by another) in order to illustrate the notion of moving everything to the seaside. As well as speaking to Zegna’s own family tradition, it also placed the collection firmly in a 1970s context. Thus we saw a breakier than usual pant shape that made Sartori’s single layer sole slide moccasins, full moccasins, and chukka moccasins look proportionally dainty.
It also explained the heavy not-quite checks (in which the horizontal stripes had often been subtracted), the spectrum of browns, and an era-specific selection of garments that included narrow-cut safari jackets with pronounced collars, knit shirt jackets, grandfather cardigans, and pullover shirts cut to carry three styles of detachable collar. This last piece featured a front slit cut so deep it almost demanded to be accessorized with high-shine medallions and luxuriant chest hair (instead of the square metal fastening it featured).
Running against this current of retrospection was the future-forward, material innovation embedded in the garments’ creation. The leather in those safari jackets was washable, and the knits sometimes crafted in leather. Sartori said that the not-quite checks had been achieved by running 21st century Zegna yarns including a silk/paper mix through the vintage 1950s and ’60s jacquard looms at Tessitura Ubertino, a specialist mill majority-acquired by the group several years ago. This application of vintage processes to cutting edge materials encapsulated a show that looked to revive a genre of masculine clothing archetypes as an articulation of masculine fashion lineage that resisted nostalgia.
The opening series of pleasingly puckered silk seersucker suiting, its jackets equipped with the box pleat action back that is becoming a regular feature on the Zegna runway, looked less precisely placed in a period. Same goes for the zingily toned tailored looks in reverse-cut Costa Francese cotton corduroy. Staging tonight’s Zegna passeggiata, Sartori said, had seen his studio base itself in Los Angeles for several weeks while finalizing the collection—a process that itself had felt like a kind of working villeggiatura. Although the company is publicly traded, Zegna retains a tightly knit familial approach and philosophy that continues to be reflected in the distinct identity of the clothing it so beautifully produces.
