ASPESI (Q2090)
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Italian fashion brand
- Alberto Aspesi & C
- aspesi official
- Aspesi & C.
- Aspesi & C
- Alberto Aspesi & Co. S.p.A.
- Alberto Aspesi & Co.
- Aspesi Official Online Store
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | ASPESI |
Italian fashion brand |
|
Statements
Lawrence Steele described Aspesi’s offer as: “a kind of uniform, but a vast uniform because we have so many categories and we are always adding and developing them.” That uniform analogy is totally on point because many Aspesi pieces are based on military or workwear. Its field jackets are arguably the brand’s defining pieces.This collection featured all that core Aspesi goodness in softened but unexpected colorways including lavender, raspberry, and mustard. There was a large section of pieces in nylon, some padded, that had a silky luster but a technical toughness. Breton knits and argyle polo shirts were tweaked ever so slightly with a tufting finish on their defining stripes. Along with the garment dyed linen shirts, a biker in black washed cotton and a parka in Prince of Wales check all looked on the rack as if they had already lived full, rich worn lives. Steele is an expert at giving his garments a kick start of patina before sending them off into the world.A blue liner jacket in lightly padded cotton featured low pockets edged in the finest wale corduroy. The same piece was delicious in raspberry nylon. An artfully crumpled linen blazer with patch pockets had been expertly dyed to create a subtle iridescent interplay between bronze and blue, depending on the light. Long sleeve linen buttons in floral prints played nicely against the house field jacket in a ripstop mix patterned in an abstracted leopard camouflage: yummy.Said Steele: “I never want it to have any emphasis in relation to trends or being trendy. It’s supposed to be anti-fashion, in that it’s not something that you follow—instead it follows you.” He added that this season part of his thinking had been a sense of dystopian romanticism, but from this side of the rail it looked not far short of utopian: a wardrobe for life.
20 June 2023
Lawrence Steele arrived in Milan during the 1980s as a youngster—he remains gallingly fresh-faced today—and became Franco Moschino’s assistant after an accidental (and tetchy) encounter. Five years later he moved to Prada, before starting his own brand in 1995, and then acting as a consultant designer for Aspesi between 2004 and 2017. Then, after a loving cameo at Marni, he returned to Aspesi in 2020. This Linkedin-ish line of introduction serves to illustrate that Steele’s expertise runs deep.The apparent simplicity of his Aspesi output belies the depth of philosophy behind it. These are contemporary clothes—paradigm pieces—built with great technical care and consideration for longevity and function. Since his recent anointment as Aspesi’s captain, Steele has created a kind of chain-letter structure for his lookbooks; the last one was shot by Vanina Sorrenti and featured Zora Sicher, who in turn shot this. Said Steele of the clothes Sicher’s cast of close contemporaries wore: “The idea was to just work our classics. To give a slightly punkier feel to them. I have this theme, which is ‘punk monks sit down and meditate.’ So working with conservative, reserved classics but playing with fabrics—metallics, rubbers, plastics, gloss—to push them.” Classic shapes undercut by apparently oppositional materials, then.The lookbook was as succinct as the formula: an overshirt in nylon placed above a crisp poplin button-up encapsulated the subtle distinction of its result. A rubberized trench coat with matte industrial fittings was uncompromisingly nonpareil. A few traditionally gendered pieces such as a poppy print dress apart, the collection was freely every-wearable. Italian tweed in a blurry green overcheck, scratchy looking but caressingly soft, was shaped into a jacket and overshirt you could see being worn both a hundred years past and hence. A patch camo field jacket, long armed olive MA-1, and emergency orange down blouson were among the pieces that most appealed on a rail whose ratio of wantable to meh was far stronger than most.
26 February 2023
Lawrence Steele is in an amazing gig that puts him in a tricky position. The gig is amazing because the brief is to progressively evolve Aspesi’s long established canon of highly refined clothing classics: a canon he has been involved in shaping for around 25 years. What makes it tricky is the conundrum of raising an attention-attracting seasonal hue and cry about a project that will never change dramatically. As he put it: “We don’t do themes and it’s not a fashion brand. And I like Aspesi exactly as it is. This puts me in the position of talking about how it’s about standards, and how we make pieces that you can come back to again and again, and the philosophy here of fine-tuning your wardrobe.”He’s right—this hardly reads as pulse-racing stuff. These are clothes built not for empty consumer calories spent on the fleeting sugar rush of acquisition, but for a high value investment that generates the slow release of pleasure that comes with sustained wearing. Steele’s current thinking is to showcase Aspesi’s broad selection on a broad selection of intimately linked people: a mother and daughter and their respective male partners (as well, in a cameo, on Steele himself). This shows the versatility of the items and suggests that rather than being signifiers of difference in themselves—look-at-me pieces—they are more pedestals that allow character to be exhibited. If the Aspesi canon is going to remain essentially itself, that ongoing here-and-there of minor seasonal evolution aside, it seems that Steele’s job is less about designing new clothes than it is designing a system to attract the engagement of new people with the brand. Because once they’re through the door, you can’t imagine them willingly exiting.
25 June 2022
At the sprawling Aspesi showroom overlooking Milan, where the label’s fall collection was presented, I had a nice chat with Lawrence Steele about not only the collection, but also the label’s ethos, and the importance of tailoring. Disclaimer: I’ve always been enthusiastic about Aspesi—and Steele. Here’s what the designer had to say.“I always think about the archetypes that deserve to be in a wardrobe; Aspesi is about underlining the identity of the people wearing the clothes, as opposed to a fashion theme I’m putting on people. I just provide great pieces for them to create their own language of self. This season I started with tailoring, and the tailored blazer with proud shoulders is where the collection is grounded. My goal was to find a form that would fit beautifully on both men and women, so that I could eliminate the sizing that is actually gender-sized. From tailoring came the rest of the choices, so the offer is slightly more formal than the spring collection. There’s also a sort of grunge feeling, but basically my work at Aspesi is about modernizing the archetypes of dressing while keeping them within a language of classic basics.”“Tailoring is becoming prominent again because, having been stuck at home for so long, our sweats have become pajamas, and I think we want to get away from those sickly pajamas. Now that we’re stepping out into the world a bit more confidently, we want something bolder and more defined, which gives us a good posture. A blazer with a proud shoulder talks of strength, even if you feel vulnerable inside.”“Tailoring and streetwear have an interesting interaction. I don’t necessarily think that a blazer isn’t streetwear. In the ’80s Madonna was wearing oversized coats, and it was totally streetwear. When I was a student at art school in Chicago, I bought a lot of ill-fitting oversized blazers in surplus stores; they fitted like T-shirts or sweats, they looked really cool because it was all about being self-expressive. I wouldn’t take the streetwear out of the blazer or out of tailoring. I’d keep it firmly rooted in whatever your identity is; you can play it from one extreme to the other. I think a blazer can be as unconventional as a motorcycle jacket. It’s the personality you put on a garment that makes it radical; the identity is the base of everything. I want freedom in the clothes we offer at Aspesi. The most important thing nowadays is to have as much freedom as possible. There’s never enough freedom in the world.”
27 February 2022
Lawrence Steele designed for Aspesi as a consultant for 13 years until 2017. Then he joined his partner, Francesco Risso, for three years in “a labor of love” as Risso worked through his first cycle as Marni’s creative director. Then late last year, Steele returned to Aspesi, this time as creative director.Steele first encountered Aspesi in the late 1980s, shortly after he had arrived in Milan from Chicago, following an internationally peripatetic childhood in the company of his military family. When he met Alberto Aspesi, Steele was working in the studio of Franco Moschino, who contributed designs to the house. Later, Steele also worked for Prada before founding his own line, Lawrence Steele, which ran for a decade and was supported by Aspesi. All this preamble is to lay out that while this collection is Steele’s first as the creative director of Aspesi, it is also the contemporary culmination of a relationship that has grown and developed throughout almost all of his adulthood.Aspesi is savored by those who know it as a source of discreetly impeccable garments whose minimal looks belie a richness of design consideration and manufacturing savoir faire: satisfying complexity within simplicity. About this collection, Steele said: “It was a question of choosing shapes and pieces that speak languages and which I could juxtapose against each other.”That apparent simplicity of Aspesi garments, plus their durability and quality, means that once they are birthed and taken possession of, they can live for a great deal of time and even outlive their first owners to be handed down. This was Steele’s thinking in the mixed-material tailoring, which was fashioned from what looked like tweed but presented a counterintuitively soft hand when touched. A fantastic slip dress, perhaps 1930s in style, looked both vintage and appealingly contemporary. The carefully oversized trench coats, patchworked striped rugby tops, and vaguely louche corduroy jacketing all whispered of the Rive Gauche in its tear-gassed 1968 heyday.The subtle juxtapositions in the clothing became more visibly alive when placed in this cast of family and friends: You could see perfectly well how the garments could be worn, interpreted, and shared by not just one person but a close-knit group of people (which is a far better policy for using less than runway renting). I’m not going to try to excavate too deeply the complexity within these pieces and this collection.
A debut that Steele has been experiencing life for many years in order to be philosophically equipped to make, this was lovely: mature, intellectual, slow, and deep.
19 July 2021