Berluti (Q3872)
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trademark
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Berluti |
trademark |
Statements
1895
shoe designer
1925
shoe designer
shoe designer
bespoke shoemaker
2019
artistic director
Walking into the Berluti presentation this season, it was impossible not to invoke the endlessly meme’d, poetically viral words of one Dominique Jackson: “Get the shoes baby, get the shoes.” For those of you who are not perpetually online, the message from the storied leather goods house was so: It starts and ends with the shoes.A receiving hallway at the sprawling Fondation Simone et Cino Del Duca was decked with a wooden log platform displaying the latest and greatest Berluti footwear, all, this time, fashioned in the company’s signature burnished patina in four distinct colors: deep mineral blue, vermilion orange, cedar brown, and mossy green. Classics like the Andy and the Alessandro were displayed alongside newer, more contemporary counterparts such as the famed Fast Track sneaker. In the main hall was the ready-to-wear, each delivery built around a color and, you guessed it, a shoe.There was a quite formal navy in the aforementioned classics paired with dressier tailoring, a couple of everyday neutrals where the standout was an uncomplicated suit fashioned in a machine knit, and a burnt orange weekender with a fabulously ingenious sandal (a bit of uncharted territory still for Berluti), and easy clothes to match. A fourth section offered some beach-side, summer-ready ecru and beige hemps and linens paired with an unstructured slipper, which also broke new ground for Berluti, as it seemed to address the current ballet flat craze in menswear.But the big headline this season is Berluti’s participation as the official outfitter of the French Olympics national team for the opening ceremony, a first for a luxury house in France (this last part was made very clear by the Berluti team). A room at the foundation was dedicated to displaying the Berluti uniforms and, of course, their accompanying footwear. The idea, explained a representative of the brand, was to lend an air of French sophistication to the athletes and their corresponding teams—a total of 1,500 people, who are all being fit and outfitted this week. That much was evident in the snazzy tricolor shawl lapels of the tailoring.But more than the uniforms themselves, it’s the effect of this new athletic mindset applied to the house’s intrinsic formality that made you look up from the footwear and focus on the season’s ready-to-wear. One key piece was an unbelievably light blouson jacket cut in the most buttery of suedes.
Think of it as the leather equivalent to those tactical nylon jackets worn by men who like the pragmatism of activewear but not the actual activity. And proof that despite its focus on footwear, Berluti has some great tricks up its sleeve (or sock, as the case may be) in the clothing department.
19 June 2024
Berluti’s attractive Sky Running trail-style sneaker—with specially produced Vibram sole, amplified stitched leather mudguards, and mixed suede leather and mesh uppers, all in multiple tonal colorways—was just one shoe amongst many at this Berluti presentation. However it was the only all-new sneaker. And with the house soonish due to outfit the 800 plus French athletes and other representatives at the Paris 2024 Olympics opening ceremony, you didn’t need a gold medal in sleuthing to surmise it might become a very well-seen sneaker indeed. Berluti’s Harold Israel was impressively immune to questioning on the matter.That was not the only tantalizing footwear innovation. A new series named Berluti Editions debuted with a revival of the Rapiecé Reprisé (patched darned) collection originally made by the house founder’s family scion Olga Berluti in 2005. As she said in a quote provided by the house: “In the past, in the 16th and 17th centuries, men never wore new clothes. Fabrics had to be strong enough to last a lifetime. For the marquis or the peasant, a man’s suit would feature alterations or mending as acts of bravery. Certain elegant Englishmen, artists, or eccentrics have perpetuated this custom. In the 1960s, Andy Warhol asked me: ‘I’d like the right foot of my loafer patched.’ It has to show! It must be Andy Warhol!”The stitched patched shoes and bags on display were beautiful nods to the house heritage, all deployed in fancily named and richly burnished colors. The genius innovation shared by Israel was that Berluti was not only selling pairs of these shoes, it was sellingtrios: by offering one unstitched shoe with a stitched pair, he said, customers could mix and match their shoes from day to day. This was an eccentric, highly Berluti move.The presentation opened with a room of classic house shoe styles—the Alessandro, the Andy, et al—in the colorways of the season. After staring into a pair of pale plum toned Oxfords, it was hard not to conclude that the patina work done on the house’s Venezia leather in its workshops to make them would make Rothko insecure. But while the emphasis this season was very much on the footwear (including a new grained square toe style), there was still room for the selection of looks you can see here. Berluti, you feel, has conceded that its footwear and bags are so magnificent that the clothes can only act as their accessories.
These included some cutely slubby jeans in a new-for-Berluti Japanese denim, an amazing oxblood mink-lined perfecto, a leather “corduroy” trucker jacket and, naturally, a cashmere gilet.
17 January 2024
“Sophisticated” means cultured, complex, and experienced—and it’s a word that also nicely describes Berluti. The 1895-founded shoe maison, more recently a broader menswear operation, has a very recognizable (and literal) signature in its Scritto relief. This morning Harold Israel, vice president of marketing and image at Berluti, was wearing a Scritto t-shirt as he delivered the latest updates.Starring garments included subtly evolved versions of the house suede blazer and bomber jacket, in blue and green respectively. Israel insisted they could handle some rain, but you’d want to carry the packable, dark Scritto parka, adapted from the military M-51 just to be sure to protect your investment. Suede truckers, suede detailed chore coats, suede field jackets, and a beautiful (non-suede) mid-length bonded gabardine raincoat were other prime movers in the season’s dreamy outerwear offer. There was some suiting, immaculate in linen, but the emphasis here these days is upon garments that are as sophisticated as they appear casual. A blue garment-dyed linen button-up was a simple thing delivered immaculately. Camp collar shirts featuring prints of Berluti products were knowing calling cards for house cognoscenti.Bags and shoes featured new hardware. The B Volute was first worked into the iron staircase at the house’s Rue Marbeuf property by Talbinio Berluti, then later used as belt-buckle during the 1980s, before being revived and refined for fresh use on bags and loafers today. There were a few new shapes in the Scritto canvas bag collection, new variations on the hot-selling Shadow sneaker, and some attractively soft bags in gold-hued house patina leather.Israel reported that the brand’s recent chip at the golfwear market has proved such a success that it is planning to dabble with its first, very rarified, exploration of activewear, but this will be revealed in the months to come. There’s no hurry at Berluti.
21 June 2023
Berluti chose a different lane for its first return to the Paris Fashion Week schedule since 2021. The brand has been operating without a chief designer—and plans to continue to do so—ever since Kris Van Assche departed. So instead we enjoyed its first presentation since June 2016’s fun and poignantBrexitmoment (between Alessandro Sartori and Haider Ackermann). Going even further back this echoed the charming first few seasons of the shoe brand’s expansion into ready-to-wear, from 2012 onwards, when Alessandro Sartori and Antoine Arnault were still shaping their vision for the house.This time though it was Harold Israel, Berluti’s VP, Marketing and Image, leading the way through the house’s Rue Faubourg Saint-Honoré showroom. Central to Berluti’s clientele-friendly repositioning is its move away from transient fashion in favor of long-term style. The result is a kind ofnon plus ultranormcore: conventionally realistic menswear pieces made with almost unreal levels of savoir faire, in the finest materials. The collection pictured here spanned three releases running from July through to the onset of winter in the Northern hemisphere, and was shot in the same semi-backdropped style as last season, to create a sense of continuity.Near-every individual piece of ready-to-wear was a luminously gorgeous staple, an essential you’d want to live in for years. Look 20’s wonderfully uncluttered varsity jacket in a rich grapey tone and Look 18’s teal overshirt were amongst my picks: you could see a broad population of (highly solvent) cultured menswear collectors putting their platinum cards down for pretty much all of it. Unpretentious garments such as look 3’s hopelessly soft burnt orange knit sweater featured tiny elevating details—in this case a Venezia leather hang strap tucked behind the neckline at the back. It was interesting to see the house again lean into its long-established calligraphic Scritto engravings, both on leather goods and in leather-patched jersey pieces—this popular part of the house code was often overlooked by past design headliners. This season it was also developed into a new dense-curlicue monogram based on a wood carving at Berluti’s Rue Marbeuf site; this was patterned on cotton canvas in highly attractive day bags and rolling luggage with leather-hubbed wheels.
Shoes, the foundation, included a new, soft-topped shearling-lined version of the Ultima boot (now without the annoyingly unuseful top-strap it once featured) that was perfect for tucking your finely draped cashmere track pants into. There was a cool new old-school track sneaker, and newer fabrications of the house’s woven Shadow sneaker. Freed from the pomp and circumstance of a show, and without having to conform to a design narrative beyond telling the house’s own rich story, Berluti’s discreet design team is producing some outstandingly attractive menswear.
24 January 2023
Berluti’s fall ’22 collection was the first by its new no-name design studio and hit stores not long ago. Word from within the house suggests that its core band of brand fans, the all-important customers, have responded positively to the new proposition. That communication between brand and fan is a dialogue, as this season’s golf capsule demonstrates. Berluti began offering a golf shoe, the Swing, some years ago. Customer-enthusiasm prompted them to offer a made-to-order golf bag in Berluti’s signature leather, which also proved a hit. So now luxury golf bros will be able to choose from B-embossed collegiate jackets in leather and nylon as well as some specially-developed pants and pullovers—plus a particularly handsome visor—to play a round in full-look Berluti.Elsewhere, this collection continued Berluti’s strategy to offer a greater ratio of de-formalized menswear, elevated by fabrication and detail, in order to appeal to men who value style over fashion. The 2018-launched Shadow knit sneaker has become Berluti’s top-selling product, and here was worn below some assertively unpretentious pieces. These included a beautifully subtle linen workwear jacket with leather detailing under the collar, and an at-first-glance James-Dean-basic jean and t-shirt look. You realized it was anything but thanks to the embroidered white-on-white Scritto detailing on the shirt. There was, as per, plenty of that proprietary tattoo-esque calligraphy on gleaming leather bags with one of three new seasonal patinas. It also showed up on folios and shoe soles and was applied to a lightly padded nylon for the first time, on bags.Look 6’s peak collar jacket was tailored in leather and outrageously understated in its luxeness. More blatantly lavish pieces included a patinated blue leather blouson (teamed in blue suede with a new driving shoe variant of the house Lorenzo loafer), and a dégradé version of the Luti tote that is being reintroduced to the mainline as a permanent fixture, again in response to customer demand. Shirts both short- and long-sleeve, as well as swim shorts were cut in attractive floral cyanotype prints. Although much quieter these days, Berluti is developing nicely.
16 November 2022
Although Berluti was founded way back in 1895, this collection marks the 10th anniversary of the house’s ready-to-wear project. And as noted in the last Vogue Runway review, this famous shoe house is currently turning on its heel to stride away from the designer-led mode that defined its footprint during most of this decade.The brand’s new campaign highlights Marcello Mastroianni and Andy Warhol, two last-century Berluti clients whose images endure as archetypes of unconventional masculine style. Sprinkled amongst the pieces in this street-shot lookbook vérité were items harking back to two other cultural titans with Berluti connections. The first was the double-faced wool and cashmere artist’s jacket in made by Berluti’s tailoring atelier, Arnys, which was a direct descendent of the Forestière jacket first made for Le Corbusier to his own specifications in 1947, possibly the first-ever example of architect-appropriated workwear. The second was a new hiking boot with a rubberized half upper: the flash of yellow revealed this as Berluti’s debut collaboration with Italy’s supreme sole fabricator Vibram, while the style was a contemporary update on the first hiking boot produced by Berluti, a bespoke commission from Greta Garbo.Both pieces were exemplary of Berluti’s apparent new strategy to present a younger, classically-minded male audience with footwear and leather goods (plus the clothes to complement them) that are rooted in the traditionalism that the label is part of while being shaped to be contemporary. The collection took in tailoring, still generated by the atelier at Arnys, but leant heavily also on the hyper-luxurified Ivy League staples that represent menswear’s equivalent of mid-century modernism. Central to all of the looks was the tell-tale gleam of much-polished Berluti leathers, which flashed variously from zipped briefcases, ‘business’ shoes, and sneakers. By shooting this collection around Paris as if mostly worn by 2022’s generation of ambitious young men—you could envisage them as well-heeled and freshly graduated first jobbers hoping for an executive future but intent on living a few more pre share-option and partnership years unshackled by shirt and tie—Berluti delicately repositioned itself away from being an obviously ‘fashion’ brand into something more fittingly enduring.
30 March 2022
Usually, following the departure of a designer, a house will present a collection by its design team—and this Berluti collection is just such a case. However it is also usual in these circumstances that the team-led product is a stopgap, interim strategy used while awaiting the arrival of the next marquee name creative director. Not here.The feeling within Berluti is that in the decade or so since its Antoine Arnault driven relaunch as a designer house— under first Alessandro Sartori, then Haider Ackermann, and most recently Kris Van Assche—this great artisanal shoe and leather goods marque has matured enough to do without the marquee support; it can articulate itself independently.That’s a happy position for that unknown team, who will be free to whisper sweet seductive nothings designed to inflame the desires of the Berluti man without considering a third voice at the table. This first autonomous Berluti collection of this first autonomous ready-to-wear era was, then, its first whisper of many to come.The team enlarged and imported the Scritto motif, based on the house’s traditional pirate map-ish calligraphies on its leather goods, into handsome silk shorts, shirts, and bombers. Patch-pocketed semi-formal tailoring was an inhalation of the distinct designer phases we have previously seen into something fastidiously neat that had echoes of the 1990s Armani-to-Prada three button raised revers template. There were some comely shackets, minimalistically luxurified workwear, a yes-please parka in laminated purple leather, and some urbanely outdoorsy shearling trekking jackets—all of which you could see igniting some debate for the Berluti browser.The real star in the ready-to-wear collection of a shoe house should in truth be the shoes, yet the process of a ready-to-wear presentation inevitably often subordinates that star status. Here, however, the talent inherent in Berluti’s core process shone through. Those slingback open-toed sandals at the end, especially, were possibly the best reason for a manicure I have ever seen. Berluti’s three great designers have served it well, and now this is a house ready to choose its own path, on its own feet.
19 July 2021
“One problem for luxury in this digital moment is that it can become hard to differentiate itself from mass-market product, because anyone with a budget can make a video in which there is good-looking product…and at the moment there is a lot of cheating going on! This is why I thought it was necessary to ensure that at least some people will be able totouchthe clothes—although unfortunately not you.” So said Kris Van Assche during our preview Zoom, held (quite a long time) before today’s pandemic-delayed live presentation (with a real live audience, who will be encouraged to touch the pieces) in Shanghai.Projected image is one significant factor in the equation of clothing, while worn sensation is another. Van Assche challenged himself and Berluti’s Italian craftspeople to surpass themselves in both regards in this collection by working in partnership with the Russian artist Lev Khesin, who has said of his work: “Probably every viewer’s first question is, ‘May I touch the painting?’”Khesin’s beautiful abstract pieces demand to be felt both by eye and hand thanks to a painstaking process of layering and then removal of many stratae of silicon and paint. Van Assche observed a parallel with Berluti’s famous application of many layers of polish on its shoes to create patina, and worked to combine the two, challenging the artisans to reproduce 10 of Khesin’s works in media, including silk shirting, a fantastic mohair suite, and hand-stitched embroidery on outerwear.Another challenge laid down by the designer was to transfer the Norweigan stitch—through which the Berluti upper is attached to the Berluti sole—into the ready-to-wear, where it centered the piping in highly lovable quilted leather jackets and some casual yet sumptuous checked track tops. As Van Assche observed: “It’s important to maintain craft but it’s also important to stir things up a little from time to time, because sometimes the product of craft does not really innovate itself.”This, added Van Assche, was the first collection in his now three-year tour of duty at Berluti in which that famous patina has been successfully transferred from footwear to ready-to-wear, and the almost light-emitting finish on a many-polished shades-of-purple leather jacket was testament to that. More broadly, this Berluti collection felt the tug of menswear’s prevailing wind vis-à-vis tailoring.
There was construction here, but in “broken” suiting cut loosely to allow movement and reflect denormalization, or as he observed: “to give the beauty of dressing up but not the stiffness that tends to go with it.” Double-faced cashmere semi-suits mixing workwear-derived jacketing and pants were another offering handsomely in tune with the times.As our Zoom wound to its close, Van Assche said he sees his role at Berluti as “giving future to historical craft” by acting as the catalyst through which that craft is provoked into new forms of expression. To my eye this collection finely demonstrated the potency of these designer-fired creative catalytic conversions between artisan savoir faire and cultural innovation. That audience in Shanghai will tell us if it is equally dreamy to touch.
8 April 2021
Kris Van Assche first reached out to Brian Rochefort to collaborate on Berluti Spring Summer 2021 straight after the last show in January. The results are creatively serendipitous because - even via a grainy Zoom - the primevally violent patterns of Rochefort’s roiling, volcanically-inspired ceramics appear highly appropriate for the churning uncertainty of now.Over that Zoom Van Assche filled us in on a collection that is to be launched via an online video of himself in conversation with his LA-based collaborator on the Paris schedule. The collection hasn’t been shot yet - in fact only a small proportion of it has even been delivered due to production delays - but what was on the rail looked strong.Van Assche said: “After two years here, I felt ready and comfortable to invite a third person to the table. Until now I have been concentrating on finding and refining the balance between my personal style in the DNA of the brand. And so after the last show in January, I immediately contacted Brian to do what I thought would be my next runway show. And then shit happened.”He added: “I admire Brian’s work a lot. I have collected ceramics for years, starting out with traditional French ceramics - pure and perfect and smooth and traditional - but little by little I learned about more contemporary forms and artists doing freer stuff. And Brian is really the most unconventional ceramic I’ve encountered... He is the bad boy of ceramics!”Since arriving at Berluti, Van Assche has dived into what is arguably its USP, the lustrous and deep patina achieved by house artisans on its leather goods and shoes. As Van Asche held up pieces of silk shirting printed to exactly replicate the colorfully robust undulations of Rochefort’s unctuous ice-creamy eruptions, the adjacency of the two practices was apparent. So too in a beautiful sweater in a patchwork riot of different color and yarn, and a shoe more restrainedly applied with a patina patterned to replicate a Rochefort bubbling.Van Assche added that from January he plans smaller collections with elements more frequently dropped in-store (every three weeks) to increase the tide of newness for the brand. Meanwhile he is developing a core collection of Berluti classics that will transcend the seasons, acting as stable sea-bed for the back and forth atop it. This seems like an admirable strategy for a subtle resculpturing.
The designer also observed of this extraordinary season: “I didn't want to do a filmed fashion show digitally. I mean, I love fashion shows, but I love them for the humanity, the realness, the emotion, the venue, the music…. And the fact that you see the clothes being worn by boys and girls. I don’t think you can translate that emotion into video. But what you can’t do at a real fashion show is transmit the backstory, the information, where things come from. People say ‘oh that was a colorful collection with nice prints’. So for the first time I suppose I can give that information first and the results after… although usually I don’t like to show a work in progress.I kind of always feel like people don't need to know what's going on in the kitchen. But shooting the conversation was nice and the way Brian works and the way I work - we connected very well.”
27 October 2020
Kris Van Assche’s first look at this Berluti show put his point across punchily: A skinny guy wore a generously but sharply cut electric blue double-breasted suit and a red polo shirt. Below he was shod in—gasp—asneaker. The sneaker was made in panels whose colors matched the outfit above and is called the Gravity. Certainly its inclusion here was a challenge to the traditional hierarchies of masculine sartorialism of which Berluti is a notable part.To push the message still further there was a second pair of shoes in this look: The model carried a 48-hour bag in treated canvas that had a special split-seam carrying section at its side. Into these, languidly angled toes facing upwards, and in patinated leather unmistakably lustrous under the light of the Opera Garnier, had been slipped a pair of Berluti’s core leather shoes. Said Van Assche: “For me, really, this look is like a metaphor, a symbol, of the new Berluti man who is very much comfortable in sneakers but also very comfortable with the heritage.”That dialectic carried on throughout a collection that also continued Van Assche’s incorporation of womenswear into the brand—Bella Hadid pops upeverywhereat Paris menswear. Pattern and texture were the side dishes to the patina deployed on those sometimes carried, sometimes worn traditional Berluti shoes, a shearling coat, and the salvo of differently dyed all-leather Berluti suits—the incorporation of patina from footwear to clothing is another KVA emphasis here. The pattern and texture included parquet chevrons on knit sweaters and fur coats, and a cracking Prince of Wales overcoat. The collection played with powerful color—a double-faced pink lined aubergine coat over a tan suit and electric blue polo was especially peppy—and the two paint-splattered acid orange cow-hair coats at the end were eyewash refreshing.New to this runway were hard-cased accessories and suitcases that were unmistakably by the British luggage firm Globe-Trotter, while shoes included a raised-sole Chelsea boot with a curved-to-point toe shape that resembled an oyster shuck. “In every look you will find some hand-craft and that is really the point of this collection,” said Van Assche in the throng that surrounded him afterwards.
17 January 2020
Gigi Hadid is shaping up as a versatile impact substitute transplanted from the womenswear runways to this season’s menswear. After a warm-up at Versace, she closed Off-White and then this afternoon’s Berluti, where there were plenty of women’s looks on show for an audience that included Ricky Martin andun des fréresJonas. Berluti is supposed to be LVMH’s solely all-menswear marque, but Kris Van Assche is not down with the same-sex, boarding school vibe. He said: “This is a man's brand, there is no doubt, but it is also nice to play with seduction…I told Piergiorgio [Del Moro], ‘Bring me the most beautiful girls in the world, because the world needs beauty!’”Even without Del Moro’s hotties in their ostrich-hazed suiting and painterly printed silk shirting, there was beauty here, plus a nice logic behind it, in the most interesting new fabrication of the collection. This was a precise studding of what resembled small nailheads, applied to an oversized bomber and backpack and then a suit. It was inspired by Van Assche’s observation that while at work in Berluti’s Ferrara factory, the shoemakers often hold nails between their lips while attaching an upper to a sole. Said Van Assche: “It’s just like when people in the atelier put the pins in their mouth…and I was like, this [Ferrara] is really my atelier now. This know-how is usually under the surface…but I wanted to put it on the outside and use it as an embellishment because it is such an inside part of the house.”Van Assche again mixed tailoring with moto-inspired pieces to evoke the complementary interplay of heritage values and fashion-forwardness he is working to achieve. This was also exemplified in the orange-accent-soled Alessandro shoes and the orange piping on this season’s bag offer. The color of the suiting, some of which included armless jackets and overcoats, or went Bermuda-formal, was a filtered-up, acidified, accentuated interpretation of the palette of dyes used at Berluti to give its footwear that famous rich patina. The house’s scritto motif (the reproduction of a calligraphically expressive 19th-century manuscript transferred to leather)—once hidden away from the Berluti show-sphere but long a popular category among customers for shoes and small leather goods—was transferred to some of that suiting and other coats and suits tailored in leather. One rare-ish all-black look placed a long perforated topcoat against a studded croc briefcase to emanate cashed-upJohn Wickmenace.
Frédéric Sanchez’s breezy soundtrack blended Anne Clark’sElegy for a Lost Summerwith breathy dialogue fromAlphavilleto build a beguiling sonic parure at this sometimes beautiful but always Berluti-ful show.
21 June 2019
When Kris Van Assche traveled to the Berluti factory in Ferrara, Italy, he was still trying to get a fix on what might become the thematic algorithm—the heart—of his first runway show for the brand he joined last April. And then he saw it: the huge square marble table at which Berluti’s artisans sit to apply dye and polish up the patina of the shoes for which this 1895-founded company is so renowned. Struck not only by the creamy deep whiteness of the marble, but the circles and blotches left by years’ worth of lovingly applied polishes—flecks of pink and blue and orange and green and red—Van Assche knew he had stumbled upon the key with which to unlock his new iteration of Berluti.“I totally, totally love the contrast of the noble and the rough. So we photographed it, and it became a print on the silk shirts, suits, and coats—we didn’t retouch it at all. And all those colors provided the palette for the rest of the collection,” Van Assche explained. To show how fundamental he feels the patina is, the designer’s first look was a hand-cut suit in patinated brown leather. The technique used to apply the richly layered fluctuating densities of color was different to that used on a Berluti shoe—say an Alessandro or an Andy—because on the suit it would have stained the clothing worn beneath it. Both through his use of color drawn from the stains on the patina table and this first suit, Van Assche was building a connection between the accessories upon which Berluti was founded and the clothes he now becomes the third designer charged with producing.Like Haider Ackermann before him, Van Assche populated this show—the only exclusively masculine house in the LVMH group—with plenty of women. With the exception of a rib-knit dress in complementary shades of blue, women-worn outfits were variations of the menswear. The final looks, simultaneously presented on both genders, were a brace of black suits: Van Assche is Van Assche. Unlined kangaroo-hide trenches, some a rich red russet, some a soft throbbing fluctuation of several colors—plus a great astrakhan-effect gray shearling, a black croc bomber, and several leather hoodie and track pant looks—supplied the powerfully animal accent you’d expect from a house that stands on its heritage in leather.Paneled moto pants stamped with the year of the company’s founding were worn beneath table-print shirting and strong-shouldered, tailored jackets or overcoats in some of the brightest tones in the kaleidoscope.
Often these came with leather shoe tassels attached to the lapel by a safety pin brooch. A gray leather trenchcoat over a charcoal city suit and a dark gray suit in a jacquard of irregular black clouds were looks in which Van Assche explored a darker aspect of patina.The shoes, all important, were bold adaptations of the Alessandro, radically sliced to produce an irregular chisel-toe shape, often emphasized with metal plates that shined under the spotlights, another play on patina. White sneakers came in the same shape. The stealth submarine toe shape was reflected in the molded leather bags—richly patinated, naturally—slung across many of the looks here.This first in-the-wild display of Berluti 3.0—the Van Assche update—explored a series of interesting dialectics: between the shine and depth of patina, between the differences and overlaps in accessories and clothing; and between the expressively idiosyncratic appeal of the brand’s core products and its position in a highly formalized luxury menswear sector.
18 January 2019
Last week, Rami Malek gave the world one of its first looks at Kris Van Assche’s new Berluti. The star, who plays the legendary Freddie Mercury in the Queen biopicBohemian Rhapsody, wore a white suit and black shirt tipped with white stitching by Van Assche to the film’s London world premiere. The trim efficiency looked familiar to anyone who followed the designer’s progress at Dior Homme; he’s brought much of the atelier with him to Berluti.With somewhat less fanfare, Van Assche is presenting his capsule collection for Spring 2019 with showroom days around the world—Paris was last week, New York today. The Belgian designer replaces Haider Ackermann, whose three seasons at the label were marked by their sumptuous androgyny. The biggest sign of change today was the Berluti logo itself, its stately serif font replaced by a sans-serif typeface of which the corners were shaved off, “to signify new beginnings,” a company press release explained. It was printed on the wall and on a white tee shown over a collared shirt and tucked into belted flat-front black pants.His first runway effort, debuting in January, will be more robust, but this set the tone for Van Assche’s Berluti: sartorial, but not without the kind of technical/casual streetwear elements that turn on the millennial customer. Berluti being a shoemaker originally, there was no shortage of leather—for pants, for jackets, and, naturally, for accessories. This seems indicative of where Van Assche plans to take the house: For every leather lace-up court shoe with Berluti’s signature ombré glaçage treatment, there was an amply soled leather sneaker, a first for the company.
30 October 2018
Tilda Swinton (of course) first introduced Timothée Chalamet to Haider Ackermann and his iteration of Berluti. Even though he’s due at the SAG Awards in just over 48 hours—where I’d wager he’ll be wearing something from this collection—the breakout star ofCall Me by Your Namewas here tonight alongside Antoine Arnault. What was his review?“This is my first show,” Chalamet said afterwards. “It was incredible. Haider is my favorite designer; he carries the idea of artistry and [being an] auteur, which is more of a language I understand on the filmmaking side, and I don’t understand on the fashion side—but he is the closest thing to what an auteur is in fashion.”To quibble, there are many other auteurs active in menswear right now (Jun Takahashi, Antonio Marras, and Charles Jeffrey all bubble forth) but from his one-show perspective Chalamet was on the money: Ackermann is awesome at evoking atmosphere, mood, and feeling via clothing. Tonight’s take was set in a faded pink cube whispered with dry ice at the end of the runway. On the soundtrack Nick Cave spoke about craving, for real love.Atop the stacked-sole boots which encourage the back to straighten and the pelvis to swing and that seem so very Haider—although he doesn’t wear them himself, shows apart—came a cast of predictably lush gazillionairewear looks.Butteryis the tritest adjective to apply to leather, but for a reason: the leather trenches and pants here were more buttery than the entire dairy output of Normandy. Some of that buttery spread was evident in the slick rich sheen we saw on the runway, but much of it was hidden; both a brandy-color herringbone covert coat with matching pants and a corduroy equivalent were lined with black leather. There were black leather boxer shorts too. An emerald green suede trench and matching pant was so beloved by the designer he sent it out twice: duly noted.For those that feel china-shop unease (me) about wearing garments so delicately precious, there were tougher, rougher, more mess up–able pieces, too: a white-shearling-lined navy coat, a green military coat with a gently distressed patina, and a series of bonded bicolor parkas in nylon in camel and gray, or in emerald and black (Stella Tennant, who modeled the camel, confessed as she left to really fancy the emerald).To be a protagonist in the menswear mise-en-scène sketched so deeply by Ackermann at Berluti all you have to do is buy in.
You probably won’t win any awards, and you absolutely will see your bank balance plummet. But you will feel like a master of your universe.
19 January 2018
In 1775, the year after Louis XVI came to the French throne alongside his wife Marie-Antoinette, the Monnaie de Paris on the left bank of the Seine was completed. This exquisite neoclassical building’s sole purpose was to make money. It contained the foundries within which the realm’s coins were minted. Just 18 years later, both Louis and his wife (nicknamed Madame Déficit for her crippling extravagance) fell under revolution’s guillotine, marking the end of over a millennium’s worth of continuous royal rule in France and the dawn ofliberté,egalité, andfraternité.Empires rise and empires fall—but money is money. This evening, Berluti, the only all-male label in the stable of France’s current golden dynasty of LVMH-owned fashion brands, made its own small mark on the long history of the Monnaie by showing Haider Ackermann’s second collection for the brand there.Not unlike the building in which we were so privileged to sit, Berluti is both beautiful and about money. Its shoes and clothes are intended to be the ne plus ultra of luxury masculine attire, and they are priced accordingly. In Paris, only Hermès competes. This presents Ackermann, a designer with a seriously particular signature aesthetic of his own, with an interesting challenge: to anticipate the desires of a constituency whose baseline attribute is serious wealth. Afterward backstage, he was hesitant to agree with the suggestion that this was a heavily Haider collection, saying, “I would not like this to be my own show. I am at the service of the house of Berluti.”You could, however, see a lot of Haider in this collection. And that was no bad thing. The narrow cut of his pants hemmed above his lizard-skin or calfskin chisel-toe, stack-heel boots: very Haider. The turned-back and pulled-up sleeve of a pale yellow leather bomber: very Haider. The slightly sickly decadence of a gold silk double-breasted blazer and trousers, whose leg line was allowed to crumple: very Haider. The throbbing oomp-oomp-oomp soundtrack and the photographer-riling way in which the models marched in no apparent order in and out of the courtyard: both also very Haider.Additionally very Haider was the addition of female looks to this aforementioned only all-masculine LVMH label. “Well, it’s always amusing to have women around. And they all borrow men’s clothes. It’s a healthy thing, a sexy thing.
” Both in black leather trenches, black knit tops, and white jeans, the appearance of Stella Tennant alongside an Eddie Redmayne-ish male model, who was either a relative or an inspired piece of doppelgänger casting, proved his point.
23 June 2017
Fashion is the myopic bubble to end all myopic bubbles. When you’re in it, it’s everything. But even the most Mr. MaGoo of us felt that there were bigger transition stories in the world today than Haider Ackermann’s inauguration as creative director of Berluti.In the geopolitics of fashion, Berluti is nowhere near the equivalent of the United States—but it is one of them. It is the only exclusively masculine fashion brand of LVMH, the largest luxury conglomerate superpower in this landscape. So, maybe Florida or Georgia—or Alaska? (Pretty butch.)The big task facing any new designer in an existing brand is how to manage the cage of the code while retaining their own individuality. For Ackermann, deeply unusually, his task was opposite: For under the wonderful Alessandro Sartori, Berluti has since 2011 established fantastic credentials as an outrageously deep-reaching purveyor of technical savoir faire. Sartori’s design instincts, however, are formal where Ackermann’s are born of Ackermann: he is a true designer of fashion whose aesthetic voice is particularly his own. Thus it was Berluti that needed to avoid getting caged here into an Ackermann code too far from its exquisite but subtle roots.The boy done well. On a black strafed plywood runway Ackermann presented overtly conventional looks at the off: a camel coat was the first look, with pants—both were oh-God-yes-please, but just that, with no icing. The first hint of Ackermann as we know him was an eight-buttoned double-breasted narrow-lapeled suit in green—a hint of the sexy nomad pirate bad boy with off-kilter spectacles of the designer himself—worn over the narrowish high-cuffed pants that were the constant in this collection.Were I a buyer I’d have been rhapsodizing tonight: In disjointedly speedy walks the models rolled forth in a symphonic demonstration of ultra-luxurious desirability. At the after-show party I spoke to Ackermann fanatics from Usher to Luka Sabbat, who all bore testament to the want-it-ness of this. The Haiderness was in the velvets, the bottle shades, the odd diagonal patching, and the nomad styling of the backpacks heaped with extra crocodile boots. Backstage Antoine Arnault, the driving force of this brand, said that Olga Berluti—its spiritual crucible—was heavily into the idea of Ackermann replacing Sartori from the off. She was right. To use a foul phrase, there was synergy here. Ackermann is a maverick, a dark force, but he is essentially liberal, too.
He’s the Bernie of menswear, just in a much finer jacket and in vintage Oliver Peoples spectacles. Berluti has a fine new commander in chief. Yes it can.
21 January 2017
Berlutiis a labor of both love and conviction for Antoine Arnault. The only 100 percent menswear brand in the LVMH stable was purchased by Antoine’s father because he loves the shoes and is a genius agglomerator of luxury, but it was Antoine who truffled it out from noble obscurity and built it into the brand it is today—a yardstick of luxury menswear. Yet Berluti at this moment is in flux. Alessandro Sartori, the author-designer and Arnault’s confrere in the project since nearly day 1, has accepted an offer he couldn’t refuse from Gildo Zegna to be master of all ceremonies back on Via Savona. We await the anointment of his successor—gossip says it might be a female designer?—in the next couple of months.Thus this evening Berluti hosted a fabulous interim presentation—no show—that provided the maximum pleasure of this Paris Menswear week so far. The clothes, hung diffidently in beach huts near the entrance, were lovely. There was a certain quilted navy bomber this reviewer totally went bananas for and would happily have ordered thrice. The raw denim, traced by leather accents, was sumptuous. Even a perforated leather coat in buttercup yellow seemed massively stealable.But the clothes were not the focus tonight. This was an exhalation before the post-Sartori redefinition to come. So in a gorgeous rose-strewn garden we wandered through a pool party inhabited by abdominally gifted models. There was a soccer tournament, a pétanque competition, and a (leather) table football showdown. We fashion-based sportsmen let rip. I played ping-pong with the Dallas Cowboys wide receiver Brice Butler and totally kicked his ass.Wallpapermagazine’s Nick Vinson showed Maradona moves on the soccer pitch—in exquisite sandals by Álvaro. Robert Rabensteiner, the ItalianVogueartistic guru and owner of the best beard in fashion, displayed hitherto unsuspected credentials as a skip-rope maestro. Alex Bilmes, editor of U.K.Esquire, stared deep into a bottle of the finest French champagne and toasted the end of Great Britain’s greatness. It was sport, it was life, and it was a moment in between something gone and something to come.
25 June 2016
What does it signify when you show your first five looks in darkness so inkily profound that all the audience can see is the barest underlit shadow of your brogue-trainers and bronze-capped, abstractly stitched formals? Answer: You are either atrociously, delusionally arrogant, or you are rather brilliant—and confident enough to know it. And perhaps you are the creative director of a brand rooted in shoes. Happily for the balance of critical karma, in this case the answer was the latter.Once the spotlight sun finally rose, it revealed a collection notable for a two-fold advance in Alessandro Sartori’sBerlutiproposition. He had several collaborators; the palette of Marfa (where he travelled to research), the geometry of Judd (whose work he went to see), and the designs of Scott Campbell (a vogue-ish New York City tattoo artist with whom he partnered). Campbell’s additions—stitched snakes on the back of bombers and shoe-uppers, as well as abstracted Aztec grids on (fake) tattoos and more jacket reliefs—added a new thematic patina to the Sartori-Berluti proposition, which has until now been quietly about elevated taste and fabrication. Judd’s installations provided the inspiration for the rectangular grid jacquards of wools and leather in topcoat and bomber.Super-notable addition two was consistent with Sartori himself who, despite working within a narrowish remit, makes ultra-luxe menswear with a formal heritage that is actually very inventive. Today’s innovation would have piqued the interest of Margiela, yet was functional as well as sartorially transgressive. A tailored jacket, featured above this review, had one set of sleeves, one back, but two fronts and two sets of lapels. This made it look a little as if the wearer had just gone on a shoplifting spree and was trying to wear his ill-gotten gains out of the store. But the idea of having a double front to a jacket—to provide both protection done up and silhouette undone—was quietly wonderful. If Sartori isn’t careful it will become like Gillette vs Schick: Next season some derivative devil will produce a three-fronted jacket, and he’ll feel obliged to respond with four.The colors were transiently desert-tinged garnets, but had plummy richness too: the seabird eggshell blues and raspberry that gently extrovert Berluti man has grown accustomed to. The shearlings were quintessential examples of themselves.
This collection contained almost as many potential angles to elucidate excellence in menswear as there were grains of volcanic sand on the runway—but that would keep us here all night.
22 January 2016
Nothing says modern luxury like the casual dismissal of material excess. The companies that operate on the most elevated strata of the fashion industry are all trying to outdo each other with the lightness of their products. But they'd be hard-pressed to beat the menswear collection that Berluti showed tonight. Artistic director Alessandro Sartori showed pieces cut from a kangaroo leather so thin it could have been a sheet of paper. Jackets were de-stuffed of any internal construction, which already made them featherweight, but they were woven from a silk/paper combination that made them even lighter. Paper might have been the secret ingredient. Sartori also had it woven with cotton and wool to create airy but surprisingly resilient fabrics for suits and jackets.When he wasn't obsessing about weight, Sartori was brooding on texture. Berluti's reputation was built on leather. With this collection, calfskin was sealed with a waterproof membrane to create a finish that felt talc-ed, powdery to the touch. The same finish was used for shoes. What made this high-touch factor so attractive is that it was combined with color of an unusual intensity in leather.It was ultimately color that sold this collection in its presentation, simply because there is no way the huge audience that filled the garden at the Musée Picasso was going to get close enough to the clothes to appreciate what they're really all about. Sartori was inspired by the relationship between Chandigarh, the Indian town designed by Le Corbusier, and the natural environment that surrounded it. Brutalist intellectual concrete vs. the intense colors of India. No contest. But Sartori actually had all his fabrics dip-dyed in gray before the other colors were applied with the pigments that are used for dyeing wool. A conceptual point to be sure: concrete gray as the foundation for Berluti's glorious mineral shades, turquoise, zircon yellow, neptunite navy blue, and so on, with a special mention for iolite violet.But concept is something Sartori has proved himself comfortable with in the past, particularly at Z Zegna. Setting a challenge, conceiving of a lateral solution—is that how the new Victor shoe came to be made from one piece of leather? Despite the little piece of theater involving dozens of boxer-short-clad, Berluti-shoe-wearing, deck-chair-lolling models on the way into the venue, the sense lingers that a fashion show is too ordinary a vehicle for what Sartori is attempting at Berluti.
Which only means it's exciting to imagine the lateral solution he might come up with to that challenge.
26 June 2015
Though Berluti turns 120 in 2015, Alessandro Sartori wanted no references to the past in his show tonight. Sure, the setting was the classic surroundings of the Musée des Arts Décoratifs, but the catwalk and backdrop were mirrored—"sharp and modern," said Sartori—and the clothes had a more active, younger image than the exercises in connoisseurship with which the designer established Berluti as a clothing label. One inspiration was jogging. Most of the trousers had ribbed cuffs, and 80 percent of the collection was cut from felted jersey in seven different weights. "A new generation of fabrics," Sartori called them. They allowed him to perform feats of deconstruction that created unlined blazers as soft as cardigans and so light that they could be layered up without any bulk.The same lightness distinguished trenches in coated silk, and jackets woven from cashmere hand-loomed with leather to make a tweed. A blue version wove together cashmere with Japanese indigo silk. Cashmere knits were airbrushed, printed, and warmed, which made the pigment eat into the fiber to create a worn-in look, the idea always being to defuse any connotation of preciousness. Same with the closing looks—tailcoats worn with crewnecks. It was a stylist's way to make a point, but it underscored Sartori's position in menswear, somewhere near Véronique Nichanian at Hermès, both of them bringing a casually contemporary but completely seductive quality to the uppermost strata of luxury.If the deconstructed jackets were clear winners, it was still Sartori's way with color that left the most lasting impression. The collection was dark-toned—Sartori felt that, too, was more modern—but it only made layers of tone-on-tone green sing. An orange trench was, quite literally, a standout.
23 January 2015
École des Mines is an engineering school in Paris, with a garden that is incongruously beautiful in light of the fact that teachers and students are more interested in what is going onunderthe surface. But the garden, a relatively secret space, was exactly the sort of place Alessandro Sartori was seeking to present his first runway show for Berluti. You could find a metaphor in there somewhere. Berluti's end product is the tip of an iceberg of incredible imagination and artisanship. For his new offering, the designer extended the brand's reach into the realm of the familiar—sportswear, rather than the elevated stratum of bespoke menswear. He claimed that was a response to a number of customers who are perfectly happy to have Berluti make everything for them: jeans, bomber jackets, cabans. The ateliers were ready. Ninety percent of the new collection is handmade.This might have been the Berluti collection where Sartori's own instincts truly asserted themselves. In his previous gig at Z Zegna, his experimental bent gave the label its character. Here, the creative impetus was origami. No cutting, just folding and pleating for pockets, collars, and lapels. It's difficult to convey the effect in words, but it was definitely 3-D, even more so when seams were hand-painted to give a patina of age. It was a novel notion in fashion, with its fresh-flesh fixation. Your Berluti will grow old alongside you.And on the evidence of this collection, it certainly seemed resilient enough to do so. Leather jackets of a supernal softness rolled effortlessly into a small ball. A silk and linen coat, with an enzyme glaze printed like leather, did the same. And using that treatment inside any garment meant that Berluti could get rid of canvas interlinings, so everything was light. Then there were the colors—rich natural tones, from sand and pond green to coral and purple. A suit of linen and paper was radiant in a shade called sunflower.Berluti is still insinuating itself into the men's luxury market. If you were looking for one item to define its capabilities, it might be the Playtime, the trainer the label launches this season. It is cut from one piece of leather, shaped by the artisans who have made Berluti shoes for decades. The feat is technical, and the feel is physical enough to clarify exactlywhyyou would want trainers made for your foot—and your foot alone.
26 June 2014
After several seasons of spectacular tableaux vivants at Berluti, Alessandro Sartori had reached the point where he wanted to do a show: a living, breathing,movingadvertisement for the extraordinary work the Berluti artisans are doing. The decision was made early enough in the process of designing the new collection that the show could become an extension of it. Which meant thateverythingabout tonight's presentation was, according to Sartori, calculated to convey the character of the company that he is building as creative director with CEO Antoine Arnault.With that in mind, it was slightly discombobulating to walk into the venue. Berluti has assiduously massaged its niche as the best of the best, and yet here we were in a parking garage on an afterthought of a street somewhere behind the Eiffel Tower. But walk on. We strolled through a "forest of creativity"—plinths supporting miniaturized wooden shoe lasts covered in the hundred different colors of leather that Berluti has on offer—into a pinewood studio that looked like the set of Lars von Trier'sDogville."Doors that are going somewhere else, walls that are creating new volumes," Sartori rationalized at a preview earlier in the day. His cryptic statement made sense once the models appeared.Menswear is traditionally a composite of minute details, which means that you'd be safe thinking that radical shifts, especially at this elevated stratum of the luxury market, are chimerical. So picture men's fashion as the caboose on that train, and then appreciate how, throughout his career, Sartori has managed to shove the caboose a few yards down the track each season with his tailoring tweaks. Here, he introduced a slash pocket to his jackets. Instantly, a new way to make your jacket work for you. He also added an intarsia pleat to the top of the sleeve, creating an articulated effect that allowed the arm to move with greater ease. As Sartori described it, it sounded so elementary that you wondered why no one had done it before.Another innovation: outerwear featuring a technical membrane of wool sandwiched between two layers of boiled cashmere, a combination so durable that Sartori imagined the coat and bomber jacket he'd cut from it would be passed from generation to generation. If this isn't exactly the planned obsolescence of fashion as we know it, that only points to what is still essentially an experimental phase for Berluti.
One jacket featured a checked pattern that had been literally scratched into the fabric; the surface of another—in mohair, for evening—had been pad-stitched for a total of seventy hours to create its texture. There was a kind of irresistible madness in such ideas, the rush of doing something because anything is possible in the zone where, said Sartori, "craft and quality meet technology." He made his fashion statements tonight—top-to-toe camel or black reflected the season's trend toward monochrome dressing, ties matched shirts throughout—and he also offered the straightforward luxury of shirts in two-ply cashmere and sweaters in twelve-ply cashmere bouclé. But it's in that other zone where Berluti's character is taking shape.
16 January 2014
One of the most famous photographs of the sixties is "Girls in the Window," Ormond Gigli's picture of 43 women in the windows of a derelict brownstone on East 58th Street. Last night, Berluti's guests filed into the grounds of the Hôtel de Sully to find that creative director Alessandro Sartori had restaged Gigli's photo with 45 male models in the windows of a seventeenth-century mansion in Le Marais. Given the business that Sartori and CEO Antoine Arnault are shaping, the extravagance was appropriate. Proof came moments later when Sartori started enthusing about Berluti'sgrande mesure, an extraordinary bespoke program that will offer clients the opportunity to order 25 different types of garment, everything from overcoats to chinos. There were appetizers tonight in the form of seven evening outfits, handmade by the atelier Arnys, which Berluti recently acquired. Picture the client for such an endeavor. Not since Cristóbal Balenciaga madeeverythingfor Daisy Fellowes, her gardening clothes included…Such completism is a provocatively sophisticated notion in menswear. Even so, Sartori imagines that, at some point, bespoke will make up a good 10 percent of Berluti's business. But tonight was about the other 90 percent. And, given Berluti's pitch for the uppermost stratum of the luxury market, there were surprises—first and foremost, howcasualmany of the pieces felt. Sartori said he'd been looking at French workers' uniforms. The cloth co-relative was a cotton drill made from a Japanese indigo cotton yarn that had been bleached before being woven and dyed. It was turned into intensely toned cotton suits that looked like the essence of Sartori's take on the formal/casual connection. The perfect match was the new two-tone shoe, inspired by French municipal workers of the mid-twentieth century.But Sartori was also proposing a new two-piece suit—a five-button waistcoat with narrow trousers—that was straight out of a vintage Italian movie. Both pants and waistcoats were cut a little short, which left a very funky few inches of shirt showing round the waistband. Above the waist, Sartori was feeling a hybrid shirt-jacket. He insisted this piece had become the center of his wardrobe, though tonight he'd dressed in a hyper-tailored double-breasted suit whose suppressed waist allowed not a millimeter of spare tire. He was, as ever, the best advertisement for his own brand.
27 June 2013
On one of his solitary rambles around Paris, Berluti's creative director, Alessandro Sartori, visited the Museum of Natural History, where the exhibits of endangered or extinct species got him thinking about the genealogy of his own profession: how tailoring had evolved, what was lost, what had survived. Last night, the same museum played host to an evening that put Berluti's genealogy on display, in the form of a "family tree" of footwear, from the first derby and hiking boot in 1895 to 2013's version of those same shoes. Full circle.But it wasn't just coming back to the beginning. Under Sartori and CEO Antoine Arnault, Berluti has embarked on an ambitious plan to reposition itself as the apogee of men's style. The great hall of the Museum of Natural History has a veritable ark of animals streaming through it. Around it last night was ranked a set of tableaux depicting some luxurious new life-forms. Or at least a new take on classics. The three-piece suit, for instance: high closing on the gilet, low closing on the jacket, with a sharp angle created by the lapel and the slant of the pocket that echoed the signature angularity of Sartori's designs during his days with Zegna. Or sporty outerwear transfigured: Japanese cotton lined with mink, sharply tailored construction. Or a new Neapolitan shoulder for jackets, with a slight pad to add definition so that the line of the jawbone and the shoulder created another of those angles that Sartori loves. And the complex treatments Berluti has always applied to its shoe leather are now being used on the clothes. Like the six layers of wax on a double-breasted trench in cashmere-lined kangaroo. The result? An intense, diffused patina of color that will evolve with time.The rest of the collection had the familiar ring of artisanal luxury—the six-ply cashmeres, the real-down-filled quilted leather blousons, the sumptuous eveningwear—but the grand timelessness of the setting was probably the truest indication of Sartori and Arnault's game plan.
17 January 2013
Last season, Alessandro Sartori had us step through a giant, dark wardrobe to enter the transfigured world of Berluti the boot maker. This season's presentation in the magnificent gardens of the Palais Royal was reached down a long grass-laid allée, intended to create the same sense of slight displacement. "The idea is to think that there is a different dimension on top of seasonality," Sartori said, waxing as metaphysical as ever about pieces that are the luxurious apogee of the designer's craft. "These clothes are a collector's dream, for eyes that have seen a lot of things, hands that have touched a lot of things."Again like last season, touching was facilitated by a series of quirky tableaux. The first was a labyrinth ("We get lost in beauty," Sartori enthused), where leathers, suedes, and denim pieces were artfully arranged among the shrubbery. Trenches, safari jackets, and bags had Berluti's signature patinated effect, achieved with a five-step process so laborious it makes the fingers cramp merely thinking about it. But the result was scarcely the trench as we know it. Likewise, a jacket in suede woven in chevrons, inspired by the late artist Gioppe di Bella, who weaved his canvas before he painted it. The denim was Japanese, hand-stitched by tailors in Torino.Everything came back to the hand: prints drawn by hand and hand-blocked on fabrics woven by hand on 50-centimeter looms (quarter the size of normal looms). Sartori wanted the irregularity you can't get with machines. The effect it created in silk evening jackets was subtly spectacular.Sartori also wanted history. He loves family portraits from his favorite decades, the forties and fifties, with the sons wearing the cherished hand-me-downs of the father. Like those evening jackets with the texture of time woven into them. And the fine linen shirts with which they were paired, which had pleated bibs abraded by sandpaper (obviously by hand) to create another kind of patina.This is fashion in a different dimension, just as Sartori says. So rarefied, so demanding that it can only be produced in small amounts (no more than 200 shirts, for instance). But the designer's dream is anything but small. The presentation ended where Berluti began, with a rainbow of shoes in a style named, appropriately enough, the Alessandro, after Alessandro Berluti himself, who created it a century ago. There were 100 different colors available for order.
Collector or not, that sounds like literally something for everyone—or, at least, anyone who fancies getting lost in beauty.
28 June 2012
"This is my dream," said Alessandro Sartori, as he invited guests to step into the wardrobe set up at the entrance of the École des Beaux-Arts. You exited the other side into the building's cavernous interior, which had been reconfigured as the world of Berluti, with five slightly surreal tableaux highlighting the first ready-to-wear collection from the iconic 117-year-old shoemaker. An "audience" of little gold chairs had been set up, on each of which sat a shoe or a last belonging to Berluti customers past and present, from Dean Martin and Yves Saint Laurent to Roman Polanski and Gérard Depardieu (big foot!). Andy Warhol's shoes had pride of place in the front row. "They're watching and judging me," said Sartori, waving his hand at the "crowd."Stepping through a wardrobe into a fantasy is a familar conceit. Sartori had no lion or witch in his dream, but he certainly managed to bring the magic. "I want humanity, I wanthands," he said as he caressed eight-ply cashmere suits. And indeed, everything in the collection from suits to sportswear has been handmade by tailors in Turin, hence the slightly obtuse name Sartori chose: Carving Couture. The carving concept definitely suited the silhouette, which was whittled long and lean, with a structured Neapolitan shoulder. And the couture element was obvious in details big (luxurious fabrics) and small (leather buttonholes).Berluti is famous for its laboriously hand-patinated shoes (and for the time it takes to break those shoes in). They're about as traditional as traditional gets. Sartori has updated tradition, not only with the shoes (the leather is now kinder to the feet; some styles have Goodyear soles) but also in a hand-patinated biker jacket, and, inevitably, a full range of leather accessories.The company's renaissance is being overseen by Antoine Arnault. LVMH was in the market for a luxury menswear line, when common sense and vision combined to turn the spotlight in house, where Berluti was already part of the corporate repertoire. It took common sense to recognize the brand's potential, vision to hire Z Zegna's Sartori to realize it. "This isn't hard," he enthused. "This islove." Could hebemore right for the job?
19 January 2012