With its latest collection, Zegna goes beyond quiet luxury

Interestingly, in his statement released to the press on the occasion of Zegna's SS24 show, Alessandro Sartori spoke of a «efficient wardrobe», since it was precisely an aestheticized idea of efficiency that seems to have guided the creation of this new summer collection with which Milan Fashion Week for men closed. As always, with Zegna, raw material, design and end result exist seamlessly - one generates the other in a geometric progression. The show's set design itself, a wall of linen bales that framed the runway inside Piazza San Fedele, was made up of those raw materials that, when the show was over, would be shipped back to the factory to become new clothes. As for the clothes, it was precisely in this collection that we saw how Alessandro Sartori's approach to design, with its proportions, its silhouette, its virtuosic minimalism, is able to make every garment of that traditional wardrobe part of its system, which it was the creative director's precise desire to reinvent in order to create a vocabulary of his own, hyper-recognizable and inter-generational.

While remaining in the realm of harmonious and classic elegance, in fact, the collection that walked the runway today bore no traces of nostalgia for the past or anxieties about the future - it was, rather, deeply contemporary and wholly present in the moment. The brilliance of the work lies in its apparent simplicity: from square, the silhouette rounded and softened, while remaining sculptural in its definition of the body. Both volumes and textures suggest an idea of incredible compactness and airiness at the same time while the proper sense of luxury is communicated as much by the architecture of the garments themselves as by their materials, which, workmanship after workmanship, Sartori has made almost sing, demonstrating the great mastery of Zegna's atelier in producing now fabrics that seem impalpable, others dense and structured, others porous. The devil is in the details, and here, therefore, one must go looking for the trace of flair: from overshirts of wafer-thin leather to massive slip-ons, from deconstructed jackets with one button at the collar and one at the waist to asymmetrical belts, passing through hyper-thin crew-neck sweaters, wide and sloping bomber jackets, knit polo shirts, and kimono-like shirts.

The closer you look the more every detail makes sense - and, which is very rare these days, there is nothing in this collection that appears derivative, ordinary or unnecessarily eccentric.  Everything is recognizable, but everything is original - Sartori seems to have found the key to remarking on the brand's new identity without being repetitive, but above all by managing to make each piece of the wardrobe his own without taking it back from the past. His yearning for a modular, linearized, modern wardrobe has not only shown that a classic brand like Zegna can soar to great expressive heights by playing, rather than on the fragile flounce of emotionality, on the bold sobriety of a vision, on measured and rigorous execution. In this sense, with this show, the brand has gone beyond the somewhat restrictive limits of quiet luxury that other brands try to summon, with, by the way, very mixed results, to go and build an autonomous status and a space that not only represent that idea of a complete and well-rounded wardrobe but appear radically new, perhaps lacking a logo but with an unmistakable identity.