As seen in a previous post, sustainability is a trend for the next season. Among the menswear shows that took place last week in Milan and that confirmed this trend there was Ermenegildo Zegna's.
While the previous season's show took place at the Milano Centrale railway station, this time Creative Director Alessandro Sartori took his audience to an industrial space - Area Falck, Europe's largest steel production plant, in Sesto San Giovanni.
The iron mill provided in the 1900s the raw materials for various companies based in the North and at the moment awaits to go through a renovation project that has never started (Renzo Piano's ambitious projects for this area were abandoned a while back).
Models walked on a runway made of recycled gravel that went well with the main theme of the collection – sustainability. A few of the garments included in the collection were indeed made from materials (nylon and wool) recycled from existing Ermenegildo Zegna waste product and regenerated, so the discourse that started with the A/W 19-20 collection (remember the "Use the existing" label?) is continuing for the next season.
In some cases Sartori took the materials that get lost at the cutting stage and made new pieces with them or recombined them with other new materials. The trick worked pretty well as you couldn't really tell which were the upcycled items (a suit woven with mohair left overs, a coat made with upcycled cashmere, sports pieces made with regenerated nylon...) and which were made with new materials.
As a whole the collection seemed indeed coherent with three-button silk or nylon suits, faded coats, printed jackets and parkas with crushed irregular creases (the industrial, artificial effects in this partially sustainable collection).
The pastel palette also evoked a sort of recycled mood, almost evoking metals losing their original colours and becoming brown or rusty orange and eventually turning a bleached pink shade.
Some of the designs featured a print based on a photograph of a pleated striped shirt (bizarre how it seemed to create a dazzle ship camouflage pattern) and in a way this represented a visual hint at the ghost behind the textiles incorporated in the design. The print and the regenerated materials pointed at the memory of a design hiding in the fibres, almost a ghost of fashion past.
According to a research made by Zegna, wool and nylon can be recycled up to four times and that's what the company is aiming to do in future, hoping to employ more upcycled fabrics into its collections.
That's not the big news, though: the most interesting aspect is that reusing waste fabrics pushed Sartori to find new design solutions and experiment with new techniques (but he also experimented with new materials as proved by the last suit in the show that came in a silk and nylon blend), which means that sustainability could help designers discovering new ways to make fashion and that's the most intriguing story about this collection.
Comments