The New Brioni, From Men’s Wear to a Man Swears

After recreating bizarre, unusual and quite often useless locations for the Chanel runways, Karl Lagerfeld decided to introduce the Parisian audience of the Chanel Haute Couture show to the studio where all the work takes place. The designer transformed therefore the Grand Palais into the atelier at the Rue Cambon headquarters in Paris, where the petites mains work away, measuring, cutting, and sewing the designs. This set seemed less contrived than the ones favoured on other shows and helped Lagerfeld reshifting the attention on those aspects of fashion that are usually forgotten for the sake of glamour.

Yet somewhere else things were slightly different: Justin O'Shea, the new creative director of the Roman tailoring label Brioni, presented his first collection on Monday in Paris, in the travertine-marble basement of the new Rue Saint Honoré flagship store that will soon be opening.

A few days before the show, O'Shea unveiled the new Brioni campaign, starring Metallica (picked because of their high levels of coolness, besides O'Shea has a soft spot for his own past playing in a rock cover band…) in crisp suits or tuxedos with a new gothic font logo (actually based on an original logo by Brioni). Besides, to chronicle the preparations behind the new campaign and collection, O'Shea posted on his Instagram page a series of spoof annoying videos starring himself in which he tries to sound funny and ironic.

But let's move onto the collection: O'Shea has retail experience having worked as buying director and then global fashion director at Munich-based luxury e-tailer MyTheresa.com, but doesn't have any design experience and that unfortunately shows. The men's suits looked indeed like the three piece suits he favours, with body-fitting jackets with strong shoulders and nipped waists, matched with tight pants (well, one model in leather gloves and a crocodile trench looked as if his clothes had some malfunctioning issue and didn't seem to be able to move properly…) and cringing shiny silk shirts and ties with annoyingly huge knots.

The collection also included full-length chinchilla coats, crocodile trenches, a coat covered in a print of guns reminiscent of Brioni's own cowboys and a jacket trimmed in chinchilla. Pearl embroideries, white leather boots, leather gloves, hard cases and briefcases completed this vision of a gangster (or Cole Haddon's Dracula) meeting a pimp in a Spaghetti Western. That was actually the entire point as O'Shea stated in a risible interview on the Vogue US website in which he exclaimed "You know how geeky menswear can get? You know what it's like! But it should be pimp! It should be fun! It should be fucking awesome!"

A concept reinforced on the New York Times where he explained: "It's very gangster to wear a silk shirt. That's the kind of guy I want to appeal to (…) They've got so much money. I don't think anyone actually says they want to approach gangsters, but I'm very open about it." (wonderful diplomatic finesse and elegance, I know…).

Most items from the collection (except the sunglasses and the coats) are immediately available on Brioni's e-commerce site and flagships and in selected retailers worldwide, but the women's wear – mainly single-button jackets and pants – are available only as custom made.

Frankly, there are a few problems here: O'Shea is obviously looking for new and possibly younger Brioni customers (trying to lure them with a historical band that hasn't released anything new in the last few years is pretty oxymoronic, though…), but he should take into consideration that there is a tiny fraction of young people who can afford the level of luxury offered by Brioni (a simple printed cotton shirt may "only" set you back €400, but a suit from the current collection costs around €4,700). At the same time the brand's traditional clientele may not be looking forward to wear ultra-expensive suits cut to show your biceps and sculpted body, especially if they may not have such bodies.

In many ways it looks as if O'Shea was replacing Brioni's suits with the ones in his wardrobe (by New York tailor Jake Mueser), sprinkling them with a "cool factor" he keeps on ranting about (the same cool factor that prompted Brioni to recently collaborate with Vêtements). But this is not the most criminal thing about him.

The worst thing that O'Shea has done so far is not transforming a heritage brand into a label for gangsters and pimps, but arrogantly considering the people who make the clothes secondary to the clothes. In that Vogue US interview he stated: "I could talk about bespoke tailoring qualities and the amazingness of the guys in Penne and blah blah blah and we got all exclusive fabrics and rah-di-rah-di-rah. All that stuff is super fabulous and I find it totally awesome and naturally cool that we have it. But that is not what a guy necessarily cares about so much at the moment. Guys want to get the coolest thing."

That's an interesting way of putting things – the cool factor is more important than the luxury factor. Somehow it makes you think, because you may find something cool on a market stall, in a vintage shop, or even in a second hand shop. In a nutshell, something cool doesn't have to be expensive, but just, well, cool. But ignoring the quality (and ignoring the rest of the catalogue – in the past Brioni also produced knitwear for women and there is no trace in this collection of luxury jumpers, maybe because O'Shea doesn't wear cashmere sweaters) can be damaging, especially because in this case the high prices can only be explained by insisting on high quality. The difference between a Brioni suit and an ordinary suit is the "invisible cool factor" offered by the fact that each stage of the making process of a Brioni suit is carried out by a different artisan (otherwise there wouldn't be any point is asking the consumer to pay 5,000 euros for a "cool" suit).

Before starting to give a voice to the artisans, O'Shea may consider doing another thing, though: in between going to the gym and the tattoo parlor, he should find the time to follow a course in humbleness and eliminate swearwords from his language. You may like or not his terrible and supposedly cool and disruptive attempts at trying to renew a historical brand, but, surely, he can do it with less arrogance unless he wants to damage himself and the brand.

"The point shouldn't be that you are peacocking around," he told Vogue Us, "I don't want to make pink and yellow and purple Pitti Uomo crap! I want to be refined and understated, but the ultimate in luxury." Now, as a critic I'm all in favour of calling peacocks by their name, but as a designer you'd better not label what you see at Pitti Uomo as "crap" as you may have just missed your chance to get invited there and to sell their "peacocks" a suit or two.

In a nutshell, peppering his language with swear words and arrogance won't help O'Shea selling suits, but may encourage critics to call him a total c**t (mind you, he looked like a proper one at the end of the runway in his wife-beater showing his tattoo-ed biceps and huge chinchilla coat).

Will the new era of tailoring, funded on testosterone and immensely superficial, prove beneficial to Brioni? Time will tell. As for the gangsters, well, Brioni was looking for a new consumer, it didn't specify if they wanted him to be also a law abiding citizen…