BEAUTY: Clothing--Eremenegildo Zegna

Moving on from last season's thought-provoking collection called "The (Re)Set" (seen here) which obliquely addressed how the pandemic has shifted ways of being and dressing, Ermenegildo Zegna creative director Alessandro Sartori presents a SS '22 collection for Milano Moda Uomo called "The (New) Set" that continues the theme. A vision of how we will be dressing in a future that includes the collapse of traditional business models as well as the climate, Sartori worked with half kimono jackets with internal belts, deep pocketed workwear jackets, fitted blousons, and long duster jackets in a great variety of materials and were constructed using sartorial techniques (canvassing at the pockets, raglan sleeves). Sartori said of this collection, "The use of materials is becoming much deeper, and continuing the recycled process is bringing us to fibers we did not anticipate before, like hemp and silk. The focus is to work with this modular approach, to think each season not of what you don’t have but what you do have, and then how you might expand it without throwing anything away but in order to increase your choices and options. At the base of it all, I think, is that comfort has become key." I completely agree: these all look to be meticulously crafted garments of razor-sharp tailoring but feel so soft and easy to wear.

I love the accompanying film because it allows the freedom to escape the runway and show clothing in other settings, and drone work adds to the creativity of this presentation: many designers have risen to the challenge of the pandemic and created some wonderful filmic content to show collections and ideas...and I hope they continue to do so in the After times. Referencing the journey of the film, Sartori says, "It starts in a place where we have all been at some point, all of us, in our mind. Not literally, physically, because we all made our own subjective construction of this place and feeling. And then little by little it is replaced as we discover, and we become freer, until we become free—and then it ends with a beautiful dinner." And even though some of the models are female, they are still modeling menswear pieces scaled down for fit.

https://www.zegna.com/