Classiness and classicism combined at this afternoon’s Brunello Cucinelli presentation in Milan. Classy touches included a comprehensive spread of today’s Italian national newspapers, eight titles in all, laid out by the buffet. The classicism was built into the clothing we were here to contemplate, which included a comprehensive slew of intelligent seasonal twists applied to the canon of archetypically tailored menswear.
Because many of the assembled looks were styled for the borderlands between casual and formal, that view also took in the T-shirts upon which many were built. These came printed with contemporaneous English newspaper reports describing the arrival at the British Museum of the sculptures, originally installed at the Parthenon, known as the Elgin Marbles.
Any reference to the modern political debate around these treasures was entirely unintended. Instead their resonance was a reflection upon the capacity of classical forms to echo across cultures. The proof of that was in the garments these T-shirts were layered beneath. Cucinelli and his team started, as ever, with the classics, before applying the mirror of moment and context to retell them for now. This season, that storytelling was loose, light, and long.
The skirts of tailored jackets fell buttock-skimmingly low, while the waistlines of roomily double-pleated pants climbed navel-grazingly high. The breadth of Cucinelli’s collar shape had also duly expanded in order to maintain the harmonic proportion of the whole. While there were some unusually top-to-toe color stories here, most notably in navy, there were also a series of powerful color brushstrokes: an apricot linen blazer above a gray T-shirt and pant, or a soft knit coral colored shirt under a pale crisp cotton suit and a dark pinstriped trench. An unusually-toned group of looks played dark brown against navy.
Cucinelli confirmed that the second point of reference after the fundamental architecture of tailoring was the period in the 1980s when the structure of tailoring was most tested by the boundaries of volume. The mix of those T-shirts, knit sports shirts, and shirting with tie-print inspired patterns under the tailoring further emphasized this fresh exploration of that historic period of creative deformalization.
One difference in Cucinelli’s approach to this subject was afforded by the technicality of today’s materials—white blouson worn over a pair of double-pleated linen pants weighed in at only 80 grams. A pair of blue suede shoes that looked like the hybrid offspring of a soccer boot and a loafer was completely flexible and foldable in the hand, while still robust and resistant on the foot. Cucinelli further experimented by applying the same roomy architecture of his dress trousers to pants cuts in ultralight denim. While a pleated jean might sound pretty wrong, it looked perfectly right.
With wearability his central mantra, Cucinelli creates clothes so classic that they operate as Italo Calvino once described classic prose: “A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say.”