Massimo Alba (Q3331)
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Massimo Alba is a fashion house from FMD.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Massimo Alba |
Massimo Alba is a fashion house from FMD. |
Statements
2007
fashion designer
“One must resist trends, respect at all costs what one believes is valid for oneself, and cultivate what I have always defined as the aristocratic taste of not pleasing.” Massimo Alba opened his seasonal manifesto with a quote by the painter Balthus, although it seemed so fitting that one could believe those were the designer’s own words. If coherence never misses Alba’s moodboard, freedom is what drives the ethos of the brand. “Everything feels very unstructured and far from the body, leaving a margin of space,” Alba said. This reflected his concept of respecting each and every different body and granting a comfortable sort of carte blanche in terms of styling options.Infused with handcrafted prints, the collection was built on colors that interpreted the seasonality of clothes and nature, muted via specific washes, mostly in natural fibers. Linen was heavily featured, as was hemp: “It is a noble fiber with a richness to it, and a very particular touch,” said Alba. “It is also special to me for what it has represented in the history of Italy and the world.” Completing the collection, a new dress named Ettore brought some stiffness and structure, paired with boat shoes crafted as a limited capsule by a Venetian artisan.Constantly evolving his relationship to the arts and the written medium (the showroom was fully covered in paper cuts and extracts from books) the designer made a fanzine to visually present the new campaign. “It is a format that binds precisely to an idea of democracy, of something that can belong to everyone, that you could also find on the streets,” said Giacomo Cabrini, Alba’s content manager and digital art director. Words are recurring elements in Alba’s world: they cover mirrors, the back of shirts, and freshly added handkerchiefs.
15 June 2024
A lot of what you see at the menswear shows is the byproduct of mathematical calculation. How much did that house pay for its celebrities, its casting, its campaign, its PR team? Can the collection make enough to earn that back? Not every designer, however, lives according to that equation. Massimo Alba, a poet to his core, is one of the exceptions.For his spring ’24 collection he considered the Alda Merini bridge near the house’s studio in Milan’s Navigli. Named after the poet and writer, who passed away in 2009, the bridge allows people to cross from one side of the canal to another and is rammed at weekends with locals and visitors alike. Alba being Alba, he seized on the notion of human connection through poetry, prose, and clothes and then: “embarked on a journey into love.”At an event at that studio last night a group of industry friends read their favorite poems on the soundtrack of a film that showcased Alba’s latest collection. This was a fresh stanza in his ongoing quest to meld high levels of sophistication and craft with a de-formalized and bohemian point of view. Construction-free tailoring in lightweight cottons, often garment-dyed, were laid over silk shirting in tile-like checks and polka dots. Cardigans, polos, swimming shorts, and leisure suits punctuated the main thrust of it. This collection represented no great twist in Alba’s work, but that was immaterial: Alba’s poetic nature and expertise in craft, both of which come embedded in the menswear, makes revisiting them a reliable pleasure.
20 June 2023
“Being independent today is very important to me. It allows people to discover you in a natural way, because you are not so evident in the market.” So said Massimo Alba in his showroom just as an impromptu and angry anarchist demonstration marched past down in the Navigli. Alba remained unruffled as the sirens blared.Alba has spent decades refining his practice as a maker of unpretentious, luxurious, and gently bohemian clothing: now he is turning his attention to understanding how he can adapt his product to chime with his customers’—especially younger customers’—psychology. “I am interested in the attitude of the man as part of his identity. The way in which he puts his hand in his pocket, the way he wishes to stand.”Pursuing his hunch that a significant demographic of streetwear teens are going to seek something less brazen but equally as comfortable in their 20s, Alba presented multiple variations of his hit Sloop Suit in richly dyed wools and cashmere mixes, plus the occasional Prince of Wales check. Artists jackets, softened military tunics, new variations on his typically supreme knits (the cashmere mix Aran and vibrant mohair/silk/wool combos were especially great), and some charming and haphazardly woven ties completed Alba’s proposal for a generationally fresh expression of emerging maturity.The garments looked refined, but notdefining: you could imagine the young Milanese men Alba recruited for his video and lookbook—and young independently-minded men more generally—using them as building blocks for a real-life emerging aesthetic. Despite the evident archaeology of formal wear in the tailored shapes and heritage outerwear paradigms, pants and shoulders were cut to move freely and afford comfort. On the way out to see the anarchists, I mentioned my younger son had asked for a suit for his 14th birthday this week, Alba punched the air and said: “This is it!”
18 January 2023
“Don’t criticize/ What you can’t understand/ Your sons and your daughters/ Are beyond your command/ Your old road is rapidly aging…”. Quoting that great ancient text as an intro betrays my vintage as a Gen Xer with parentally-inherited Boomer references. A shift in the criteria of taste that mostly flummoxes the old and defines the new is a natural byproduct of generational change. Massimo Alba is amongst the minority whose minds are flexible enough to bend when the winds of change are whipped up by a change in the generational climate.“If you are able to start designing by looking for a better understanding of others instead of imposing your understanding upon others,” said Alba, “then you have the key.”What unlocked this revelation afresh is that Massimo’s son, Nicolo, is about to turn 18. A few years ago he was a nailed-on hypebeast, whose first stops on a visit to New York were Off-White, Supreme and Kith. Now he and his Milanese contemporaries are maturing into a fresh phase—they’re tailoring curious—but the criteria under which they operate are their own. “It’s nothing to do with elegance. It is certainly about not being this new English word I recently learned: ‘awkward,’” said Alba. Massimo has been using Nicolo and his peers as an informal focus group, inviting them into his studio. “They are super-curious to learn but also they have their own point of view. A lot of it comes from music. And the way Virgil worked has been so influential… I think it is like being a DJ. You propose something and the people dance. But even while they are dancing you have to think of the next piece of music. We need to let the people dance. And because fashion is generally led by old people like me we have to meet with the true protagonists to understand.”This handsome philosophy translated into a classically-rooted collection designed to be worn irreverently. Bi-color yarned slouchy cardigans, wide necked slub cotton T-shirts, half-sleeve linen polo shirts, garment dyed patch pocketed artists jackets with matching pants—effectively day pajamas—were all versatile pieces. There was a wide range of jackets and suiting in yarn-dyed linen, cotton and silk mixes: precious pieces created in a spirit of unpreciousness. These were beautiful tools for dressing that came free of any of rules.
19 June 2022
“We don’t have any raw materials, any commodities, here in Italy. But what we do have is this heritage of processing, making, and taste with which we fashion the raw materials. People in the US, UK, and France appreciate this and they recognize it. But maybe sometimes we understand it less here in Italy. Talking about it isn’t to claim to be superior in any way, but to highlight a point of difference that is really unique.”Massimo Alba said this as he turned and pulled at two brushed wool cashmere check jackets, one apricot, one teal, and each with a complementary colored cashmere beanie stuffed in one pocket. Handling his Made in Italy ‘denim,’ the stitched silk collarless shirts of the season that he is especially proud of, a beautiful fleece-lined check parka, and some straight legged chinos made with a purposefully robust cotton twill all served to back his hypothesis.Alba is usually as gently spoken as his clothes, but there was an extra burst of passion this season as he spoke about the opportunity for Italy’s rich store of artisanal manufacture to ensure the traceability and provenance of its materials in order to safeguard the environment. Overdyed corduroy jackets and pants were subtly multi-toned while a raspberry grandad cardigan provided an-in-your face punch of color. This lookbook video was shot at the highest point of the cable car that climbs the face of Mont Blanc, appropriate for a designer whose work is becoming ever more elevated even as it remains sincere and unpretentious.
19 January 2022
“Everything starts from the word ‘content,’” said Massimo Alba at his dreamy Navigli showroom this afternoon. You can guarantee that when Alba considers ‘content’ he’s not thinking TikTok trifles, Snapchat stuff or call-out posts—he’s going deeper. Content is a state of being, a spiritual and physical satiety, as well as a word that, before it was recast to signify digital filler, once meant the ingredients that are combined to create a whole. Alba’s ingredients today started, well, with content: a brief film shot in Pescallo on the east-facing side of Lake Como, just across the point from Bellagio. Here his models dragged a row boat down the cobblestones and into the mountain-framed waters, then dived in. “As always I’m trying to show a community living together, sharing time and beauty, colors, energy and love,” said Alba.Diving into the collection itself, there was plenty of color and energy to love. Finger-painted cashmere sweaters, every example hand-made and different, floated above tie-dye shorts. Unironed unfinished cotton, a little bobbly and uncolored too, was cut into loose jackets that would gain a lovely patina with age if you avoided red wine or coffee calamities. Soft, light and barely-washed lightweight jeans and coats were 100 percent Italian content. “Sustainability-wise, I like the idea of wearing something that has come from close by and has not travelled halfway around the world to be here,” said Alba. His perennial ultra-light corduroys, his second most consistent characteristic after that dreamy cashmere, were dyed in tangy, lip-smacking, almost lurid tones: a pair of pants in unripened banana green; one of his Tyrol jackets in an orange so urgent you could probably see it from the other side of the lake. Alba’s super-thoughtful slow fashion has seen him gradually expand to a network of five impeccably-placed stores across Italy. What would bring him further contentment, he said today, would be to find modest but meaningful places in both New York and London to continue to spread his super-soft, wear-forever gospel.
19 June 2021
Tie-dye never goes away, and nobody does it with as much sophisticated consistency as Massimo Alba. Even before he founded his brand in 2006 Alba was exploring the potential of garment dyeing techniques to add many-patinated dimensions to the surface of his garments. This collection included overdyed oxford shirting that had started blue but resurfaced as a strange and compelling green, robust cashmere pieces swirling with hand-scrunched patterns in dye, and a series of double-dye experiments on corduroy that gave this most textured of materials the depth of tone it merits and made each garment unique.Soft-handled alpaca and almost felty yak knits further amplified a color story that reached full volume via a series of Alba’s habitual soft tailoring pieces crafted in a knowingly aggressive orange check and and a herringbone and windowpane whose green was just one step across from heathery to bilious.New additions to the Alba conversation included a reversible tweed and quilted nylon jacket, and some fetching brushed and billows-pocketed shirting based on the attire of the Bergamo-born mountaineer-meets-philosopher Walter Bonatti. Returned was a fresh edition of Alba’s graphic handkerchiefs—sample exhortation: “Respond to every call that excites your spirit”—which this season were also transferred to a shirting capsule. Alba had teamed up with some of his neighbors in Milan’s laid-back Navigli district to produce a sweetly succinct short film. This displayed how finely these clothes fit this particular environment, while showing their potential to enhance the environment of any spirit who responds to the call for Alba’s brand of intensely flavorsome menswear.
15 January 2021
Not unlike Paul Smith’s study in Covent Garden, London, Massimo Alba’s studio in Milan’s Navigli is peppered with collected eclectica that acts as both souvenirs and inspiration. Always new upon his walls are his slogan handkerchiefs, of which this season’s include one printed with an image of a wave-vaulting marlin underneath the words: “Where the crowd goes, run in the other direction. They’re always wrong.”Alba was poised to become a magnet for the crowds himself following his clothes’ starring role in the upcoming —but now corona-delayed—James Bond film. He seemed circumspect about the situation. “I think that everything that comes from nature we have to consider. It’s sometimes hard, sometimes dangerous, but we have to face it.”His adaptive technique this season was to create a thoughtful film with musician Alyosha Bisceglia that showcases both this season’s clothes and also Alba’s slow-marination philosophy for cooking them up. He also showcased the womens’ collection in parallel with the menswear.That menswear featured a few surprisingly in-your-face combinations—a blue Liberty print shirt over a yellow check shirt above washed green linen trousers—and Alba said this season he had relished experimenting with a contrast of acid tones in a neutral context. Quieter details such as the delicate fluctuations of blue in an air-dyed cashmere sweater or the fade on an indigo water-dyed tee exerted their usual pull—these were pieces to enjoy wearing and weathering for years to come. When the crowds do go in Alba’s direction they won’t be wrong, because his clothes are so right.
17 July 2020
As Kerry Olsen wittily riffed in theNew York Timeslast Friday, the decision of Daniel Craig (and it was indeed he, a real-life customer) to wear a corduroy suit by Massimo Alba for a crucial extended action scene in the soon-to-be released James Bond flick raises some pretty darned profound existential questions about the deadly British ladykiller spy.It is not only that corduroy is a fabric whose utterly non-Bond signifying span runs from elderly rural conservative to left-leaning intellectual louche (in fact corduroy’s previous best celluloid champion was Donald Sutherland’s weed smoking literature professor inAnimal House). It’s also that James Bond is an (albeit entertaining) one dimensional, anachronistic masculine cipher—a toxic superhero—and that Massimo Alba is a man and designer who operates in multiple dimensions, all of them positive.Just take a look at the outfits here. For me, the slipper is the only misstep: although very Alba, it was too insubstantial a base for the experiments with volume he played with this season. In the studio this morning I went through pretty much every piece of outerwear (with a bunch of other Alba freaks) trying them on, and crooning. If James Bond were dressed in that green brushed cashmere oversized overcoat when he encountered a barely-dressed superhot megalomaniac’s daughter in her dad’s lair, he wouldn’t seduce her then kick her to the curb; he’d enquire about her feelings and join her book group.In Alba’s studio there were two hand-dyed yak/cashmere/wool sweaters purposefully given license to pill: their roughness and singular to each piece bruises of color were like watching an emotional sunset. Dressed in one of these, Bond would question the value of working as an assassin for the remnants of the rapacious British Empire with a clarity that might lead him to charity work rather than another bloody film. Especially excellent cameos in this collection included the new articulated pant shape in a light and gently flexible cotton, and the oversized check wool coat, and the hooded cashmere check coat and… close to everything, really.The rush of significant editors into Alba’s studio after McQueen and before Ferragamo was testament to the not entirely Bond-fuelled truth that this long-warming designer is entering a hot window of opportunity: the wider world is close to catching up with his slow-fashion, high-quality, just-feel-that-hand point of view.
Alba’s independent house is an extremely small one in the wider Milan landscape, but with the right allies and partners that could change. Daniel Craig also deserves props for dressing a character against whose lucrative but many limitations he has so publicly railed in garments that give him room for growth rather than imprisoning him.
12 January 2020
Around a decade ago, not long after he started his own label, Massimo Alba made a great mistake. A batch of shirts and T-shirts he was working on that had already been garment dyed one color were mistakenly exposed to another. Speaking at his showroom presentation this weekend, Alba said: “It’s very interesting to me that so many good things start out as mistakes like this.” That accident was to Alba what the mold-infected petri dish was to Alexander Fleming: a stumbled-upon eureka that led to a career-defining course of investigation.This collection featured a series of softly tailored jackets, corduroy pants and shorts, plus light cashmere sweaters that were hand-overdyed two, and sometimes three colors. It’s a process that led to variations in tone that included acid-trip floods of purple on purple to a subtle bleeding of magenta across mustard yellow. Like most of Alba’s garments, these dyed pieces appeared at first glance conventionally prosaic. The more attention you gave them, however, the more their exceptional qualities became evident. Take a pale blue jacket, for instance, which at that first glance seemed passingly related to a surgeon’s scrubs. To the hand it was light and almost textureless in its softness: The fabric was a cotton mousseline developed for Alba by Albini. Long-sleeved, in a delicately mottled finish of washed-out sky blue, it made for an ideal mid-summer shacket; in pink, sleeveless, it was an impactful shirting second skin.Other interesting developments this season included a cotton pant named the Myles with a cutely kinking stitched gather at knee-level on both legs and another handsome pant, baggy in white poplin, with patch pockets. A blue tropical weight jacket named the Lenny, after Bernstein, was Alba’s interpretation of a bohemian creative’s ideal piece of workwear. Collarless shirts in ripstop linen and button-up short-sleeves in terry were further finely effectivecoups de théâtre. Alba is a self-deprecating yet dangerous designer: Try just one carefully chosen piece and that’s it, you’re spoiled for good—because nobody else quite compares.
17 June 2019
It’s hard to write about Massimo Alba, and that’s partially his fault: Although he’s a fun and fascinating conversationalist, when you interview him on the record he becomes restless and a little tongue-tied. He roams around his eclectic showroom asking for your opinion instead of offering his. His clothes, though, are extraordinary, a fact that becomes ever more evident the more you spend time either wearing or looking at them.Alba started his first line in the 1980s, which was named after Magritte’s home address. He then worked for the Italian cashmere house Malo before a stint at Scotland’s Ballantyne. Then, in 2007, he started his own eponymous label.In slow, studied brushstrokes, Alba has carefully developed his brand, ably supported by his wife, Marilena, and their now-wheezy labrador, Jasper. All of his pieces are less designed than incepted. A cashmere hoodie, a pair of slouchy fine-wale cords, or a variant on his signature Gstaad jackets—based on the Tyrolean jacket but transported by Alba to a beautiful and pragmatic compromise between tailoring and sportswear—invariably bear a rich pentimento: Patina peeks out from behind patina. This season’s variation was a yak and wool mix, quilted, which will be perfect fare for the punters roaming his newest store just in the shadow of Mont Blanc.Alba also makes excellent womenswear, but his menswear is a special cult. Whether you only have one of his many emotionally printed handkerchiefs or a full look, you will be joining a club whose breadth surprises more and more every season. Unlike the output of so many brands based on surface hype over double-dyed substance, his are clothes that are more than souvenirs of a moment. Alba is a designer of garments that will fit into your life, and which will enhance it greatly.
23 January 2019