Brioni (Q3958)
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Italian menswear house
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Brioni |
Italian menswear house |
Statements
2006
joint CEO
2009
sole chief executive
2006
joint CEO
It’s a matter of equal opportunities. For nigh on 80 years, Brioni’s peerless Romanfatto a manotailoring was only formally available to men. Then, last year, creative director Norbert Stumpfl cautiously began to sprinkle a few refigured feminine pieces into his mix, before showing Brioni’s first-ever stand-alone women’s collection last season.We started today’s tour in one corner of the new Brioni showroom that was filled with mannequins. It was easy to admire the floor-length, wide-leg pant shape Stumpfl freshly introduced and nod appreciatively as he described the methods used to create his double-faced cotton trench coats and soft-touch python bags. A wide-revere tuxedo embroidered with 8,000 knots, each tied with a tiny Swarovski crystal was highly impressive (and apparently sold out).It was in the next room, however, that Stumpfl’s most significant step forward in presenting his womenswear this season was revealed: real-life models. The luxuriant flow of the dense but intangibly light ivory silk in a floor-length shirtdress with inside-stitched patch pockets only became apparent as it was walked from one side of the room and back again. A strong-shouldered, nipped waist, long-skirted white double-breasted jacket worn over a prominently collared (only semi-tucked) blue shirt and those long wide trousers in a ripe tomato red looked like a lightning rod outfit for character amplification as it followed the same route. And a single-vented white coat version of that previously seen crystal-knotted tux—but here featuring 16,200 crystals applied over 40 hours of handwork—assumed its full room-stealing magnificence when humanly inhabited.After this press presentation wraps up tomorrow, it will stay open for Very Important Clients who are in town for the shows and keen to see more of Brioni. Stumpfl said they will be able to make made-to-measure orders, and that eventually he hopes that clients who are interested will be able to visit the Brioni workrooms in Penne to see their garments being made. There is another VIC event happening in two week’s time at Bergdorf Goodman. With clothes of this quality, there can be no substitute for seeing them with your own eyes, touching them with your own hand, and ideally enveloping your own being within them.
18 September 2024
The Brioni presentation was held in the courtyard of a Milanese palazzo, transformed into a verdant labyrinth where groups of mannequins were displayed, apparently enjoying some leisure time—lounging on the lawn, sitting casually on trees, resting on benches with aplomb. Norbert Stumpfl was busy walking guests through, prompting them to touch and feel up close the breathtaking lightness of the most luxurious fabrications the high-end market can offer. Brioni is the high-end of the high-end.“We’re a very small team,” he said. “But we have four people devoted only to researching the best fabrics, made exclusively for us.” The lightness of Brioni’s fabrications is preternatural; when you touch the cashmere-silk blend of a weightless deconstructed blazer, or the vicuña of a thinner-than-thin jumper thrown casually over an equally ethereal seersucker overshirt, it feels as if you’re touching a cloud. It’s a rare sensation of extremely expensive nothingness. “I want to give our customers clothes they can forget about,” said Stumpfl. He wants garments to be supremely luxurious yet unassuming, nearly disappearing into the background. “You almost don’t pay attention to them, what’s important is the face, the person.” A very fortunate person indeed.Chez Brioni, formal tailoring is transmuted into a virtuoso exercise on the supplest, most sensual suiting construction possible; the more fabrications are weightless, the more they’re difficult to cut with the required firm precision. But apparently nothing is impossible for the über-skilled Roman Brioni tailors: the shoulders of an entirely hand-stitched cashmere blazer were soft, velvety and gently rounded. “The line of the lapel must also be perfect,” explained Stumpfl. “Shoulders and lapels are the most important part of a jacket’s construction, because they frame the face like a portrait. They give you a subtle, elegant lift.”
15 June 2024
Norbert Stumpfl held Brioni’s first-ever exclusively womenswear presentation at the 1945-founded house’s Milan showroom, just one door down from that of its Kering cousin Balenciaga. Unlike traditional Italo-luxe heritage peers such as Loro Piana or Zegna, Brioni’s origins are rooted in tailoring and construction rather than fabrics and materials. And unlike its raucously rebellious Parisian neighbor, Brioni’s philosophy has remained intrinsically Roman: Let the classics endure as the times change around them.As Stumpfl explained, this compact standalone womenswear collection is not a question, but an answer. He said: “Demand has been growing and growing to the point that it seemed right to meet it. The collection comes from the same place as the menswear, with the same ideas, colors, materials. Although we have introduced some new shapes.” Like the menswear, this collection is handmade in the house’s wonderful Penne tailoring facility, which sits alongside its venerable and impressive school dedicated to bringing fresh generations to the craft. Like the same-seasonmenswearcollection, this was informed by the house’s interesting origin connection with Mariano Fortuny. Unlike that collection, however, Stumpfl and his team chose to emphasize Brioni’s foundation in tailoring rather than any satellite informality.Look four was a for-women example of Brioni’s pinnacle of expertise in crafting unstructured tailored garments from handmade layers of the thinnest, finest fabrics. “Honestly, this shouldn’t exist! It’s crazy the amount of skill and precision that it takes to make it.” The result was an ensemble whose facade appeared substantial and authoritative yet whose reality is almost shockingly intangible to the touch. There were beautiful capes, coats, and trenches in cashmere, vicuna, silk gabardine, and all the usual luxe-suspects. A blazer-buttoned cropped and fitted field jacket in Prince of Wales silk-wool check and a gently striped darkest-blue three-piece suit in softly durable super 160s wool were both cut with subtle yet evident consideration for the female forms they were conceived to clothe.A box bag clad in 25-karat gold accessorized a house-cut double-breasted notch tuxedo jacket—with extra darting at the waist—and white intarsia pants to create an intensely refined quintessential evening ensemble.
My two cents on this extremely rich (in both senses) and elevated niche Brioni womenswear initiative is that it could be presented more dynamically, without going full runway. Seeing these clothes move—or even better trying them on and giving them a spin—would much more effectively translate their specialness than leaving them hanging unlived-in on rails and mannequins.
26 February 2024
Ever since its foundation in 1872 by Eugenio Torelli Viollier—who would go on to launchCorriere della Seraa few years later—the Circolo Filologico Milanese has been dedicated to unravelling the most acute and nuanced cadences of language. This morning Norbert Stumpfl brought his Brioni, which is similarly committed to the minutiae of cultured menswear, to take up temporary residence in the space.The mannequins were set up across the darkened library and several other rooms below. The producers dropped Easter egg nods to recent notable Brioni moments across the set-up—a pattern with the name J.Law was hung within easy eye-shot—but the really extraordinary detail was left to Stumpfl to reveal. “I found this in the archives—because you know I’m a book nerd: Gaetano Savini [Brioni’s founder] worked with Mariano Fortuny for ten years. He was Fortuny’s assistant and worked alongside him.” That detail was nuts. Fortuny was a polymath (what you’d call a high-achieving multi-hyphenate) who invented new lighting systems for the theater and was a celebratedcouturierin womenswear, most particularly for his Delphos dress. Knowing Savini’s proximity to this suddenly made the color and romanticism of early Brioni collections (which became so influential in the US during the 1950s) make fresh and fascinating sense.This research inspired Stumpfl to articulate that connection in order to restore it to the fabric of Brioni. There was a pleated evening shirt embroidered with a grosgrain design by Fortuny, shared with the permission of the designer’s foundation. An evening jacket was embedded with pearlescent sequins just as Fortuny once used Murano glass, and a closing silk jacket in bronze silk shared the tight narrow pleating—sort of pre-Miyake Miyake—that once made the Delphos gown so celebrated. There was also room for technical innovation achieved by artisanal means, including a double faced jacket of two super light fabrics attached by scalpel and silk. There was a full cast of crushingly handsome menswear that ran from the sartorial to the apparently casual.There was also a small cluster of mannequins in womenswear, something that Stumpfl has been quietly developing for a while. As we considered his floor length tuxedo coats and wickedly cut silk wool pants, he dropped another surprise: for the first time since its foundation nearly 80 years ago, Brioni will show a full womenswear collection at Milan Fashion Week next month.
13 January 2024
Norbert Stumpfl presented this Brioni collection in a private apartment that takes up the 29th and 30th floors of the 1954-constructed Torre Breda. With a few notable exceptions Milan is a low-rise city, so seeing the Brioni clad mannequins came with a dizzying view of Italy’s fashion capital below. And not unlike visiting the Torre, seeing Stumpfl’s work induced a form of sartorial vertigo: this was among the giddily highest level of menswear that Milan has to offer.Stumpfl’s Brioni formula has refined itself over the seasons. The lavishly wrought wow pieces of his early chapters have been supplanted by a more assured approach. His clothes are absolutely built around tailoring, of which his silk cashmere peak lapeled double-breasted jacket (quite long of skirt and totally unlined and unstructured) was representative. Beyond that foundation were many semi-casual but intentionally exquisite pieces such as a tan nubuck duster coat with crocodile-lined collar, worn half-button shirting in some silky blend and loosely unpretentious linen pants.After discussing the recent arrival of Brioni’s womenswear (the silk trenches and sleeveless coats are especially fine) in the brand’s network of recently redesigned stores (in the manner of London’s Bruton Street townhouse outpost), Stumpfl considered a mannequin and lamented: “The clothes look their worst as they are at the moment. Once you wear them in and they look a little bit washed and used, they're going to acquire the imprint of your personality and look a lot cooler.” By example he cited his own favorite coat in nubuck, which is now mapped with scratches courtesy of his poodle Lulu, who jumps all over him every time he comes home from work.After picking our way through a fountain garnished with liquidly draped garden party tailored looks, then navigating a group of more rugged, workmanlike ensembles in washed cottons (my favorite zone), we emerged onto a patch of lawn: the eveningwear section. If there was wow to be found it would be here, and there was, but of a much more restrained form than before. Considering the black silk evening jacket with a grid of around 40 tufted squares created by the house’s Abruzzo artisans hand lifting the surface layer from the fabric—“it takes two hours per square”—was quite something once you knew that detail, but hardly demanded attention if you didn’t. These were clothes for their wearers and not their watchers to revel in.
17 June 2023
Brioni’s Norbert Stumpfl is apparently a happy designer: “I have the most excellent team of artisans behind me, and what they are able to achieve is a dream come true for me,” he said at today’s presentation. He has every reason to feel so elated, as what Brioni stands for is an idea of luxury which is as exquisite as it is private and understated. “As a designer, I don’t need to scream,” he said.Every season, the unbelievable quality of fabrications and execution seems to reach new heights, a sort of limitless research whose results never cease to amaze. For fall, cashmeres were proposed in varieties so weightless, a whisper probably would be heavier. Vicuñas and alpacas were more ethereal than a passing cloud; deerskin, suede and nappa were as soft to the touch as the skin of a newborn. Going through a Brioni collection makes for an almost preternatural sensorial experience.The same sense of rarity and sophistication was expressed in the subtlest of color sensibilities, with tones so suave they brought to mind Caravaggio’schiaroscuro. No wonder Brioni is a Roman house: if there’s a place where the light is glorious, resplendent of every possible hue from gold to amber to topaz, that’s Rome. Stumpfl captured it in the sensuous fall palette, which emphasized the ease and fluidity of the soft tailoring that Brioni masters. This season, the play on proportion was subtle as usual, with a tad more room for enhanced comfort in longer jackets, fuller trousers, lighter and rounder shoulders.Women were offered the same supple, luxurious options, with enveloping wrap coats, elegant elongated skirts, classy evening smokings made in the same exquisite fabrications. Stoles and capes added a charming touch and a couture spirit. “Brioni’s style is almost invisible, not overpowering,” said Stumpfl. “It gives you comfort and confidence at the same time. We definitely enjoy spoiling our customers.”
14 January 2023
Norbert Stumpfl came across a mid-’50s newspaper with pictures of Brioni’s collections of that time: “They looked incredibly modern,” he said at today’s presentation. ”They made tailored jackets out of jersey, trousers in leather, traditional masculine suits were made with sumptuous women’s evening wear fabrics.” This spirit of modernity is what he wanted to propose in the spring collection, presented in the verdant private cloisters in one of the hidden locations Milan is famous for.Expanding on the idea of individuality, Stumpfl offered an anecdote: “One of our young clients choose a pale pink suit to propose in,” he said. “It made me so happy, it felt so nice, and it was proof that Brioni is the go-to label to celebrate the most special and intimate moments.” The sentimental gesture of the young customer inspired him to draw the line: for Spring, he said, “no business, no ties, but supple, formally informal tailoring for young men.”Playing on subtle contrasts, pajama suits were made in silk knitwear; blousons in matte crocodile felt as malleable as jumpers; a shirt’s fabrication. light as air, was used for an equally weightless unlined soft tailored suit. Reprising the house’s tradition of using women’s fabrications for menswear, a trench coat was made insatin de cuir, a heavenly smooth, sumptuous fabrics with a discreet, inconspicuous shine. Stretching the remarkable skills of Brioni’s tailors and artisans, a three-pieces suit was entirely made by hand as if it were a couture piece. But the jewels in the collection’s crown were the evening tuxedos, made in precious silk jacquard woven on antique looms by Setificio Leuciano, an historic artisanal company which was purveyor to the Royal Palace of Caserta.The edited women’s offer was as elegant and breezy as the men’s, with masculine silk shirts elongated to become a dress worn over soft straight pants, and ankle-grazing evening coats impeccably cut. Brioni is imbued with a quintessentially Roman mindset: lightness of spirit, a perfect eye for beauty, and the natural allure of nonchalance which comes from millennia of proximity with the world’s most stunning artifacts.
18 June 2022
In Pursuit of The Lightness of Air could be a good headline for what Norbert Stumpfl is doing at Brioni, whose fall collection was inspired by Bruegel the Elder’s painting at Rome’s Galleria Doria Pamphilj, The Allegory of Air. “I’ve been mesmerized by this painting for a long time,” said the designer. “I wanted to capture the image of air, which is both intangible and essential, trying to create substance in the absence of weight.”Stumpfl lives in Rome; the extreme beauty and decadence of the city inspired the set he staged for the collection’s presentation in a rundown Milanese palazzo. Sounds of church bells chiming and water rippling softly from fountains, images of piazzas paved by ancient cobblestones and flocks of birds crossing terse blue skies: the atmosphere was of poetry and romance, framing a collection exquisite in execution and exceptional in the quality of its ingredients.During his tenure at Brioni, Stumpfl is creating garments whose inconspicuous weight belies a substantial mastering of the meticulous craftsmanship Brioni is known for. “I’m pursuing an ideal of luxury which is very private and personal,” he explained. “No labels, no logos, it’s only for you to know. It’s just making the man look more beautiful, with no artifice. You see a man wearing Brioni in the street and you look at his face and think, ‘Oh, he looks so good!’ I want just his personality to shine.”There isn’t a hint of rigidity or constriction in the beautifully soft-tailored suits and overcoats fashioned from the best, most luxurious yet almost impalpable fabrics Stumpfl favors: baby alpaca, vicuña, ultrafine cashmeres and high quality wools. Heavenly to the touch, they’re rendered into shapes which are smooth and supple, yet precise in their moderndécontractésophistication. Details are discreet, deceptively unassuming and painstakingly handcrafted: buttonholes are stitched on both sides to make them more elegant; the edges of a jacket in black crocodile, moisturized with aloe to make it soft, are hand painted to achieve the perfect finish.Picking up on Broni’s tradition of creative eveningwear, Stumpfl proposed a series of special pieces, often made with fabrics borrowed from the feminine repertoire. A black smoking jacket was studded with minuscule patches in hammered silver, sewn symmetrically with imperceptible stitches as if they were floating on its surface.
On a more flamboyant note, a classic tuxedo was cut in languid, sensuous emerald silk satin, usually used for ball gowns or feminine evening dresses. Women customers appreciate a dedicated Brioni bespoke offer, which from this season will be expanded further; a capsule of six looks was developed from traditional men’s wardrobe staples and fitted to suit the female form, conveying the same attitude of unassuming luxury and gentle confidence.
15 January 2022
Just in time for its 75th anniversary celebration last January the house of Brioni appeared to have found itself on an even keel after enduring several years of stormy weather. That crisp 2020 evening at Pitti in Florence, Kering’s François-Henri Pinault threw a beautiful dinner party in an exquisite palazzo soundtracked by some of the world’s finest classical musicians, all of whom looked as good as they sounded sublime in Norbert Stumpfl’s freshly-established expression of Brioni’s peerless Abruzzo tailoring expertise. With Brad Pitt doing the campaigns, what could go wrong?Fast-forward to this afternoon, where this correspondent’s antenna started quivering during an appointment for Brioni spring 2022. And it wasn’t that the oomph has gone out of Stumpfl’s work—because it hasn’t.Shot, perhaps tellingly, in and around the romantically neglected house of a faded textile dynasty near Milan, Stumpfl’s work remained a symphonically sensuous menswear melody you’d want to play by wearing. Gowns, jackets, paneled-front knits, and pants were all crafted from overdyed upcycled off-cut tie silks, some displaying washing instructions (dry clean only). Scalpel split deconstructed jackets in the finest cashmere and linen, tonal jackets and shirts in English linen, outrageous artists jackets in Jacques Cousteau blues, outerwear in lotus-treated water-repellant nubuck, and a chic bespoke boiler suit in linen/wool/silk provided further notes in the chorus.Following last season’s frankly decadent gold—not gold-colored, but gold—suits (which sold well in various markets and had a turn at the Oscars), Stumpfl’s closing flourish here was a jacket in gold and silver floral-ish jacquard that was woven at the rate of 5 centimeters a week. There was also a very touching cameo by a pair of silver shoes that were an homage to the designer’s mentor, Alber Elbaz: The late great maestro had worn a pair of the same in gold to Stumpfl’s wedding.These were only a few riffs worth reveling in from another highly beguiling collection by this designer. That bum note mentioned earlier was struck not by the clothes, but by something both more abstract yet equally tangible: Even compared to last season’s showroom appointment there was a sparse and hesitant atmosphere to this presentation—just a few pictures on walls, a couple of mannequins, the clothes on rails.
The hush in this Brioni showroom, compared especially to the hubbub of the house-clad kids running in and out of Balenciaga next door, was notable.As Kering’s only pure classical menswear brand—and one acquired so relatively recently from its former Roman owners—this seemed the most muted moment in its narrative since the grand, horsey hoo-ha of 2013’s runway show under Brendan Mullane at the Castello Serbelloni. Fast forwarding to now, Brioni under Stumpfl does not deserve being allowed to become overgrown through inaction: This is the moment for dynamism, for pressing on, and for highlighting at maximum volume the peerless masculine savoir faire that Brioni’s artisans possess to a world that is fast recovering its appetite for beautiful one-of-a-kind wearables.
18 June 2021
Norbert Stumpfl took inspiration for this Brioni collection from a fresco that was painted in 1614 by Guido Reni at the Palazzo Pallavicini-Rospigliosi, in the house’s home city, Rome. It shows Aurora, clad in gold raiments and radiating light, leading Apollo through the night sky to bring dawn to the darkened world below. This collection’s Aurora was a closing suit, shirt, and dickie bow all cut in a fabric spun of 54% silk around which electromagnetic wave technology had clad a 46% coating of 24-karat gold. Said Stumpfl: “There’s not Lurex or anything like that, and it doesn’t have the scratchiness of other metallic fabrics…the technique used to make this is quite new, and after we found the manufacturer we learned that there is another client for this material here in Rome, at the Vatican.” He added: “For me it’s less about ostentation that it is about hope. It’s about bringing light back after the darkness.”In truth this gold suit was about hopeandostentation. And while the rest of the collection was less eye-catchingly lavish and more muted in tone, the fabrication was equally sumptuous. Bouclé knitwear was fashioned of blended cashmere and silk, while hand-spun scarves blended cashmere and suede. A hand-painted and soft-treated crocodile skin panel at the front of a zip-up jacket was seamlessly bonded to cashmere sleeves and back panel. It was worn above a pair of slim-fitting, lightly seamed pants whose cut, Stumpfl said, has become Brad Pitt’s go to, and beneath a double-layered scarf of pure vicuna. Newly roomily-cut belted overcoats came in cashmere brushed to create a cloudily diffuse finish. Tailoring included a marvelous alpaca double-breasted jacket based on a house archive formal-ski piece from the 1950s, and jackets in deerskin and alpaca, as well as wide-lapeled and hand-finished jackets that were part of a suit Stumpfl attested is the lightest ever achieved by Brioni.Customer-favorite Prince of Wales checks were delicately distorted to blur their definition in cashmere jackets, while combat trousers were presented with same-color informal shirting to reduce the definition of the wearer: “I’ve put on a little weight during lockdown, and wearing tonal looks can help you avoid emphasizing that,” the designer offered. Some pieces came in exclusively produced Escorial wool while denim pieces were offered in a new slightly stretchy Japanese-made selvedge.
“It is almost completely sustainable, this denim, and it has a sustainable wash, and sustainable metal hardware. The only part that is not sustainable at the moment are the threads in the stitching because they do not hold the wash, but we hope to change that soon.”You could see the denim’s easy stretch in a short film that unfussily showcased the pleasures of free movement and supreme touch offered across this collection. That gold suit was spectacular, but it did not overshadow another excellent offering from a house that under Stumpfl has found its stride.
25 January 2021
“So we were talking to Brad Pitt,” said Norbert Stumpfl, “and he was saying that he really likes workwear.” For that name-drop alone Pitt represents excellent value, but the actor’s now two-season campaign stint for Brioni has showcased Stumpfl’s alpha menswear on Hollywood’s prime alpha to great effect too. Until now, though, Pitt has been shot in tailoring. For this spring collection Stumpfl took the hint and inserted some workwear jackets; fitted, not-quite-trucker shirts; and pants into a collection that is usually pitched at men for whom workwear means a bespoke three-piece suit.Some of the results you can see in Looks 12 and 14; however, a photo, film, or even live fashion show cannot translate quite how these bad boys feel to wear. Most workwear is cut in high-density cotton drill, sometimes with a soupçon of added synthetic for extra resilience, but these were fashioned in overdyed and washed silk, woven to have more substance than your usual Versace party shirt but still caressingly light and soft on the body. This fabrication worked so well that Stumpfl also extended it to a long-lapel blazer, but it was the navy work jacket that cried out most insistently to be shoplifted from Brioni’s showroom.Elsewhere, in keeping with the weirdness of now, this was a collection that doubled down on the identity of Brioni as a Rome/Abruzzo tailoring house that was a pioneer in introducing Italian menswear to the U.S. market. Fully tailored and canvas jackets in 110 gm wool—“the lightest jacket Brioni has ever made”—came in a fetching check that became almost transparent when you held it up to the sunlight. This fabric was also used in jackets/shirts with buttoned fastenings at each hip, a throwback to early Brioni leisure jackets from the 1950s.Overcoats, a blouson, a safari shirt, and pants were cut in two layers of superlight material so thin that when they are spliced together it takes a scalpel to create the opening. A raincoat in technical silk was, Stumpfl promised, “100 percent waterproof”: none of your mealymouthed “water resistant” at Brioni. A pulsating raspberry evening jacket in Como-milled moiré silk with a satin lining was among the highlights in a series of, for Stumpfl, unusually in-your-face color statements.
It turns out he’d been using lockdown to deep dive into the Brioni archive, which is indeed, as he observed, “crazy…crazy!”According to the designer, even during lockdown sales have been ticking over nicely, especially for the highest-fabrication, short-run pieces. However, this was a collection that cried out to be worn as it was shot in Rome: out, in the sun, with a happy dog, enjoying the feeling that impeccably made and carefully chosen menswear gives you. That feeling you get when you squint at your reflection in a shop window and think: Hey, with a good plastic surgeon, some lipo, and some prosthetics, I could almost pass for Brad Pitt.
27 September 2020
The 15th-century salons and ballroom of the Palazzo Gerini were so darkened at this Pitti presentation—the chandeliers were switched off and draped with tattered muslin, and the only light sources were artificial candles clustered in corners—that at first you could barely see the marbled floors, the lush paintings, the Gabbiani frescoes, and certainly not the Brioni clothes. But as your eyes slowly adjusted to the dimness, what was clear as day was the music. Brioni’s design director Norbert Stumpfl and the evening’s mise-en-scène manager Olivier Saillard had between them recruited some of the world’s finest male classical musicians, dressed them in Brioni, and then left them to it.Thus in the Palazzo’s Sala Gialla, father and son cellists Andreas and Ingemar Brantelid (of the Royal Danish Orchestra) sat between the two long muslin-covered dining tables in the near darkness playing Tchaikovsky variations. Andreas’s instrument was a Stradivarius later observed to be worth probably more than the Palazzo: They both wore evening jackets, the son’s shawl-collared, the father’s silk and double-breasted with wide (11.5cm, Stumpfl specified later) reveres.In another room, the star Greco-Peruvian soloist Alexandros Kapelis swayed behind his grand piano as just a few of us stood in the inky salon to be saturated in a Debussy arabesque. He wore classic pianist attire: black tailcoat and trousers in wool Barathea and a white cotton dress shirt.The most populated chamber was the White Room, or Sala Bianca, in which an eight-strong baroque ensemble led by Andrea Lucchi of Rome’s Orchestra Santa Cecilia on trumpet did stirring justice to two pieces by Purcell, and another by Handel. Double bassist Ulrich Wolff of the Berlin Philharmonic looked rather louche alongside his more formally attired colleagues in piped silk pajamas and a cashmere dressing gown—apparently he was also wearing two pairs of (non-Brioni) long johns for fear of a chill. On cello, Professor David Pia of the Conservatory of Geneva (who looked a little like the Dutch soccer striker Robin van Persie) had shed his mink scarf; his double-breasted mouline wool suit and herringbone jacquard cashmere sweater were insulation enough.And so it went on, for seven beautiful rooms in total. At the chat afterwards Stumpfl revealed some crazily beautiful details.
The almost punkishly animated string trio in the final Azzura room were all wearing decorative jacquard jackets whose fabric had been woven in Venice on a loom dating back to the 1600s. One white cashmere coat was not colored thus, but was sourced from the wool of an albino goat. “We do this to show we can do it,” Stumpfl expanded, “but the clothes are quite simple, quite basic.” By this he did not mean Old Navy basic (oh no), but canonically classic. “For me it’s, ‘I see the man and I don’t really see the clothes.’ ”
7 January 2020
Brioni’s Austrian designer Norbert Stumpfl has an impressive resumé, having cut his sartorial teeth in prestigious fashion houses under the direction of the coolest designers in recent fashion history: Haider Ackermann at Berluti, Kim Jones at Louis Vuitton, Lucas Ossendrijver at Lanvin, plus a brief stint at Balenciaga. Now in his second season as Brioni’s design director, Stumpfl’s expertise was on display in the Spring collection. Shown on mannequins, the presentation mimicked a day in the life of presumably one of the many über-wealthy and famous Brioni customers, spent in his private apartment lounging on an expensive leather couch, hosting a black-tie dinner, even taking a relaxing bath assisted by his adoring girlfriend, who’s casually wearing some of his expensive Brioni pajamas. For such a quintessentially luxe label, the presentation felt a bit formulaic, redolent of the witty displays made by another of Stumpfl’s mentors, the sorely missed Alber Elbaz. Still, it’s no sin to be inspired by geniuses, Diet Prada notwithstanding.Stumpfl is clearly reveling in the wealth of supreme tailoring expertise at Brioni, both personally and professionally. The collection showed his natural understanding and affinity with the house codes, which he infused with a sense of restrained modernity, a sophisticated chromatic sensibility and a twist of Italian sprezzatura—the art of wearing well-lived-in expensive clothes with a cultivated attitude of nonchalance. There was plenty to like in the collection, starting from a gorgeous bomber jacket made of finely interwoven leather ribbons in a palette of browns and naturals; going through a series of smartly-cut blazers in heavenly smooth fabrics, softer and more malleable than a shirt; ending with the most glamorously relaxed tuxedos, cut in a lavender shade of silk moiré. It was easy to imagine the likes of Brad Pitt, Tom Cruise, and Jake Gyllenhaal in these pieces.Updating tailoring menswear’s codes, especially at the highest echelons of sartorial luxe, ultimately comes down to mastering an exercise in subtlety and finesse, offset by a modern creative vision. As Stumpfl said, it’s about touching formality with a bit of informality and swagger. He definitely knows how to do that.
16 June 2019
New season, new design director. Norbert Stumpfl is in, Nina-Maria Nitsche is out. Stumpfl, Austrian by origin, was previously design director under Haider Ackermann at Berluti (replacingAldo Maria Camillo), prior to which he rolled with with Kim Jones at Louis Vuitton (during the Supreme moment), which followed a stint at Balenciaga that came after his formative nine years working alongside Lucas Ossendrijver at Lanvin. Stumpfl said: “Lucas was my teacher. He taught me everything about fabrics and cuts—he is arealdesigner.” And so say all of us.That education became apparent as Stumpfl toured us through his first-season panoply of luxury menswear, highlights of which included a greatcoat with crocodile under-collar in a robust, floury finished camel cashmere wool mix; suede and leather shirts and pants with a new, near-invisible seaming technique involving a complicated bias-cut stitch; a check seersucker suit so pared-down that the jacket weighed just 340 grams; Japanese denim lined with cotton checks; silk-paisley-lined soft-shouldered cashmere jackets; a cashmere and wool hoodie lined in shaved mink; Norwegian shoes in cordovan leather (the bit from the horse’s ass) handmade in the waterproofveldtschoenconstruction; and knit Astrakhan jackets and gilets over cashmere cotton track pants—plus a sweetly Astaire-ish tailed evening suit and a very Prince Harry morning suit.Although everything on Stumpfl’s mannequins was precious—and will undoubtedly be priced as such—that preciousness did not seem wedded to an insistence on delicacy. You could imagine these clothes looking even better after a bit of real-life roughing-up.As the softly spoken Stumpfl entirely failed to suppress his excitement about this new gig at Brioni—“Being here is just a dream; the materials you can work with are incredible . . . the fabrics arespectacular”—I kept looking at the neckline of his sweater. Up out of it, a striped Nehru collar was peeking on the left side, but seemed to have fallen below on the left. Was this on purpose, or a minor wardrobe malfunction? “It doesn’t matter! It’s all aboutsprezzatura, that very Roman thing—you wear all these amazing clothes but once you have them on, you just don’t care.” Brioni’s recent existential agonies make Sartre look well adjusted, but if the house can give Stumpfl a fair go—a tenure that lasts a few years rather than a few months—it might rediscover its confidence and move on with a new robustness.
12 January 2019
To be a suiting house right now is like being a chamber orchestra when the world seems intent on listening only to hip-hop and techno. Nina-Maria Nitsche, however, is making sweet music with the instruments available to her. For her second season she continued to show via a cast of diverse “real” people wearing the collection in various images that looked like stills from a film—although, to what extent, say, designer and architect Matteo Thun and his outrageously gorgeous Capri house feels real rather depends.Each character modeled three looks, of which one typically was evening, one formal/semiformal, and one more informal. The emphasis on evening, Nitsche explained, was to show that there is a diversity of characterizations via clothing available to men on their way out to party: Gallerist Sam Pratt’s evening suit, whose lapels were encrusted with volcanic stones, and journalist Gérard Holtz’s three textures of silk three-piece tuxedo were testament to that. There was a lot of layering of seersucker over complementarily bobbled piqué, or herringbone jackets over herringbone shirts. The young son of a surgeon named Alberto del Genio wore an awesome shirt with a very subtle palm tree shadow relief, and a familiar-looking commercial director for a fashion brand named Grace Fisher and her daughter looked great in their bespoke pearl silk suits. Artist Enzo Cucchi wore the work-of-art Brioni jersey suit, which should be the garment of choice for anyone who wants tracksuit comfort and suit-suit vibes in the same outfit.Beautiful clothes, for those who care to listen.
20 June 2018
Nina-Maria Nitsche joins Brioni following a career that has seen her work for 20 years alongside Martin Margiela, plus several more at the house he founded after his departure. Then there was a recent aside at Vetements. So what would she make of Abruzzo’s high temple of tailoring? Since starting in June she’s been spending time in Rome, where the HQ is, and in and around Penne, where the clothes are made. She seems galvanized by what she has found: “It is incredible to see how a jacket is constructed in 230 steps. . . . This was quite amazing and I am very interested also to see the know-how, and and see how to evolve the know-how.”Brioni has been in flux since letting itself be flummoxed by its appointment of and rapid disappointment in Justin O’Shea, who is now running his own brand his own way. Nitsche’s first collection, which she described as a “start-up,” was carefully done, but in its way experimental. Ten real men, of different colors, ages, and nationalities, were cast and shot wearing three looks each from the collection. This was done to show the span of the brand, or as Nitsche said: “Brioni is about a man who is not linked to an age, physicality, or nationality.”Thus Alessandro, a youngish medical director from Milan, was shot in his child-cluttered apartment wearing a version of one of Brioni’s most interesting vintage couture commissions, a travel jacket featuring extra poppered loops by its patch pockets. This was over a double-faced cashmere sweatshirt with loose wool pants and white sneakers. Another Brioni man, a “far-fung traveler” from New York named Brian, wore a beautiful cashmere camel coat over a black hopsack suit and a fine-gauge white turtleneck. Gabriele, an older businessman based not far from Brioni’s home, worked a boldly lapelled single-breasted brown suit (of the type he favors as a real-life customer) over a crocodile blouson. And so it went. The closing three-look set, starring a furniture artisan from New York named Hisao, featured two beautiful couture pieces, a jacket and a robe both made from vintage Japanese tapestry. There was handsome beaten metal jewelry—lapel pins and cuff links—in the shape of mistletoe, laurel, and bamboo, designed by Nitsche.
21 January 2018
We started with an expensive, impressive, immersive projection of a snowy forest shot from the point of view of someone in rotation, dizzily. On the soundtrack, Björk Björk-ed, with all her glorious ethereal insistence. Were we about to witness some kind of snowbound breakdown for Abruzzo tailoring’s finest? Not so much. This was more of a lunchtime daydream, an Alpine projection from low altitude to high and back again—all before slipping back behind your desk.The suits were beautiful, sculpted on the body, with waists pushed high to elongate the whole. We began with a suite of grays, but then the injection of hiking boot instead of city shoe pointed to an ascent ahead. The colors shifted—a transition from the urban to the natural—into a loden heartland of deciduous greens. There were two extraordinary furs of monochrome snippets grafted into herringbone. Our man was high, yet still observing his usual patterns. There was a sort of artist’s smock and a recurring Beuys-meets-Alpine hat that whispered of repressed ambitions gathering force.Backstage Brendan Mullane outlined the layers of sandblasting and overprinting, addition and subtraction that had been applied to these clothes to lend them their pentimento depths.Brioniis rooted in a long-evolved formalism, an exquisitely evolved mask of a man. Yet Mullane tests the limits of this formalism and, as he does so, discovers that it still has some uncharted territories to dream through.
18 January 2016
Last season's was a big-deal birthday show. This time it looked like Brioni was taking up a runway residency in Milan for good following years of static presentations. Often you can argue that traditional sartorial houses—of which Brioni is one of the foremost in Italy's pantheon—benefit from presenting their collections in an environment where you can push and pull at the garments, maybe even give them a test-drive for yourself. But Brendan Mullane is as engaged with the language of fashion as Brioni is rooted in the dialect of tailoring, thus the movement and mise-en-scène of runway suits his work. Back at the Sforza Castle, Mullane's Brioni was touched by the architecture of Carlo Scarpa. "His whole world was an understanding of season, mood, and material," said the designer backstage.On two-button notched suits—Brioni's bread and butter—cut in super-light woolen silk there were hand-painted blocks and stripes in opaque shades of artist-mixed blue, green, and gold. Short-sleeve shirts, some similarly printed, some plain, were worn under also-sometimes-printed fine-knit T-shirts and over trousers—a not at all bad summer smart-casual suggestion. A raw silk shirt over Bermudas was another. Parkas of Japanese nylon were marked by Scarpa, too. But along with referring to the architecture of someone else, Mullane played with the canonical elements of his own house. Belts were applied to tailored jackets, countryman style, and further rustication of Brioni's sophistication was expressed through suede elbow patches and incongruous suede patch pockets with exposed stitching. The austerity of this show—the pounding music, the po-faced marching—rather belied the engaged, intellectual eccentricity Mullane teased out here. Brioni felt appropriately the king of this castle.
22 June 2015
The menswear runway show was invented in 1952 when Gaetano Savini, cofounder of Brioni, decided to tantalize the buyers who had come to Florence's Palazzo Pitti for the couture collections with something different. Savini's concept was straightforwardly revolutionary (you can see it on YouTube): He recruited a handsome devil named Angelo Vittucci to wear a dozen suits whilst working the room of mostly female department store buyers into a state of high excitement.The ploy worked, and Brioni became the first Italian tailoring house to break into the U.S. Last night, the company, now owned by Kering and under the creative directorship of Brendan Mullane, marked its 70th year in business with a piece of runway theater that had none of the endearing naivety of Savini's groundbreaking innovation yet was just as persuasive.Mullane's concept was to link the form of Vienna's Spanish Riding School with the Wiener Werkstätte, that same city's decorative arts modernist precursor. Hence his models fairly cantered around their carpeted arena, and the show climaxed with a synchronized intermingling that might have troubled the watching Kering whip-cracker, François-Henri Pinault, had disaster ensued. No fear: The choreography was as disciplined as Mullane's gently equestrian-touched and Werstätte-patterned tailoring, accessories, and outerwear. You had to look hard at the models as they rushed past to spot the quiet integration of somewhat Vorticist grids on the knitwear. The odd buckle (under the shawled collar of a cardigan), bridle-strap key chain, or double-pleated and tapering jodhpur were confidently sensitive hints at horsey-ness. Duffel coats, blousons, and jackets came in faded checks, which Mullane said were both horse-blanket inspired and reminiscent of Brioni pieces that were featured on a 1970s cover ofL'Uomo Vogue. So while the designer played with his idea, he reined in any hint of excess in its expression to leave the audience a clear view of Brioni's core proposition—handmade ready-to-wear tailoring that is as seductive now as it was in 1952.
19 January 2015
Nearing its 70th anniversary, the Roman house of Brioni enjoys a history in menswear so distinguished and celebrated that it need only crack open its archives to find fresh nuance. Upon doing so, creative director Brendan Mullane, a Brit who knows his way around bespoke, was thrilled to discover candid footage of Hollywood greats Cary Grant, Henry Fonda, and Richard Burton as they were being fitted in Brioni suits for various roles. Inspiration struck, Mullane said during a live presentation—a heady, leisurely blend of fifties film noir and modern-day Los Angeles.This was an unabashed collection layered with meaning and saturated with color. The designer said he wanted to reinvent the house's Columnar look, defined by boxy shapes on top and tapered, slightly cropped trousers below, around which other markers of casually elegant men's dressing were assembled: varsity-style jackets, polo shirts, Bermuda shorts. Reliable houndstooth plaids, herringbone weaves, and Prince of Wales checks featured prominently.Now, about those saturated colors, so brazen in their searing tones of fuchsia, electric blue, and acid green, creating intricate, iridescent floral patterns tightly held together on silks and knits like the pieces of a puzzle. Mullane collaborated with L.A.-based artist James Welling, often cited by designers, to achieve the triple-exposure effect. Photographer Collier Schorr, another favorite among fashion circles, created the short films screened at the launch. Evocative of celebrity stalking—as in secretly taping actors through bedroom windows—they set a vaguely forbidden, slightly illicit tone that lent a dose of drama to the romance.
23 June 2014
Brioni co-founder Gaetano Savini traveled to Japan in 1963. The historical record exists—it's a small, age-stained diary withArigato=Graziescrawled across the cover. When Brioni's current steward, Brendan Mullane, turned up the journal in the house archives, it was like he'd received a sign from above. Mullane has made a habit of retracing the Brioni founders' steps (last season, he replicated their trip to London), and he packed his crew up and took them all to Japan. The result is perhaps the most Japanese collection of ultra-luxury Italian suits ever attempted.The entire enterprise is premised on bringing together the two traditions. It started on the micro level: Mullane spoke of borrowing colors from Caravaggio (rich cherry red, deep green, navy) and weaving them into Japanese suiting wools, then garment-dyeing Italian cashmere coats in a pink the color of Japanese cherry blossoms. From there, it grew to macro: There were traditional Western suits in single- and double-breasted iterations, but the apex of the mix was a suit silhouette inspired by a kimono, with inset lapels and a belted waist. It drew the largest crowd of goggling Italians.On the trip, between visits to Tadao Ando's building and the Naoshima Biennial, Mullane met with a 450-year-old firm of kimono artisans, from whom he commissioned a custom print featuring cranes, bamboo, and plum and cherry blossoms. It showed up printed onto silk shirts and woven into suits, but its wildest and most luxurious expression was on a bomber jacket hand-painted with the crane motif. It will be a limited edition and, as the euphemism has it, priced on request. Which in the end makes it different less in degree than in kind from Brioni's usual wildly luxe fare. (This is a collection that includes a full-length mink with a Prince of Wales pattern hand-cut into it with a razor.)Skeptics may wonder at the wisdom of a departure as marked as this one, but wonder is at least as worthy a response as skepticism. "To me, it's quintessentially Brioni," Mullane said of the collection. "Everything has that nod to Italian sartorialism, but taken to the next level." Besides, Savini isn't the only traveler with an understanding thatarigato=grazie.Cross-cultural appreciation goes both ways. "Most of the customers of the kimono company," Mullane confided, "are also Brioni customers."
12 January 2014
It was the Roman Spring/Summer of Brioni's Brendan Mullane. The recently installed English-born creative director had taken his team on a pilgrimage to London, in homage to one its founders first took in the fifties, but it was the spirit of Rome, the label's native (and his adopted) home, that ultimately exerted the stronger pull on his second collection for the brand. He showed in the Accademia di Brera, the centuries-old art school stocked to the gills with Renaissance art, and stood his models like sculptures on plinths in its interior courtyard, surrounded by enormous photos taken of them in Rome's famous Villa Medici by Collier Schorr. He was mentioning the sexy, swarthy antiheroes of Italy's neorealist cinema, lingering over the name of Helmut Berger.Berger's lizard-ly sex appeal has been a touchstone for designers for decades. It was hard to detect anything as sinister as his influence here, save for the gleaming precision of tie bars peeking out of jackets and collar pins sealing shirts tight at the throat. Even with them, the look remained politely dapper. Still, there's no arguing that Mullane's Brioni shrugged off some of the strictness of full suiting without losing its tailored sensibility. "We're working around the heart of the sartorial company and thinking how we can make it grow," Mullane said. Though needless to say, the stores should still runneth over with suits, the looks here were markedly more casual: blousons and short-sleeve sweaters in silk jacquard copied from a necktie in the Brioni archive, single- and double-pleated trousers, a baseball jacket whose check pattern was painstakingly handwoven from wispy strips of suede. Those checks were a major point of focus in the new collection, and on close inspection, even the light blue of a raincoat turned out to be a check pattern in miniature.
23 June 2013
When Brioni announced late last year that its new creative director, Brendan Mullane, had been plucked from the design studio of Givenchy, eyebrows were raised. In this day and age, "old" and "new" don't have more distant avatars than those two labels. But Mullane has turned out to be a technical, sartorial wonk of surprising depth. And while Brioni's customers need fear no Rottweilers, Mullane proclaimed it his mission to shake off the label's dust. "I think Brioni wrongly picked up the image of being this dusty brand," he said. Back in the fifties, the label was leading the charge for new fabrics, like silk, and unusual colors. "I really want to put it back to the tradition of being innovative," he added. "It's the epitome of elegance, but not stuffy and old."Brioni's gray-haired reputation is something that its previous creative director, Jason Basmajian, battled, too, and he had some success broadening the line's offerings to invite in new generations of fans. But Brioni may always be an older man's game. Few young men, save those of princely extraction, can afford the label's luxe—most gratuitously displayed here in the form of a crocodile bomber with white gold zips and a mink lining.The collection's styles remained studiously, if pleasantly, untrendy, inspired by luxury train travel. But Mullane's initial outing included smart steps in an evolving direction. He introduced a new suit fit, the Gaetano, slimming the arms, raising the armholes, and tapering the legs while maintaining the traditional Brioni natural shoulder. And he worked to unify the collection by using materials and details across categories: Suiting may be Brioni's trump card, but now its jackets feature the same hand-stitching as its suit jackets, accompanied by bags in the same fabrics as its outerwear.
13 January 2013
Having taken Brioni young, artistic director Jason Basmajian is now taking Brioni colorful. Color was the big story for Spring at Brioni as, indeed, it's been one of the big stories so far this season. If it sparks more at the Italian suit house than at some others, that may be because it's a notable change in course. There was scarcely a gray or navy item to be seen. Basmajian piled on reds, ochers, teals, and purples at the outdoor presentation he staged at Milan's design museum, La Triennale. The inspiration was Slim Aarons, the unofficial official photographer of "attractive people in attractive places doing attractive things," as the lensman himself once put it. Each individual tableau at the presentation—a game of pétanque, a picnic on the grass, guys perched on Vespas, and so on—would've been a subject worthy of the master.It wasn't just that the designer cut his unlined jacket in cherry red. It was that he showed it with a bathing suit, too. Model Arthur Kulkov was cycling around in a dinner jacket of deep plum. Several models were wearing specs from Brioni's new sunglasses collection (optical to come), and several had on sneakers, too. Even where the past was referenced, as in a lapel-less wool crepe hopsack cardigan jacket based on a piece from the sixties, it was slimmed and shaped to forestall fustiness.Brioni's far from the only heritage label looking to sell to youth. But according to brand reps, its boldest items are moving from stores with its older and younger customers alike. That's reassuring, for fans as well as for PPR, the luxury conglomerate, which finalized its acquisition of the line at the beginning of this year.
24 June 2012
According to artistic director Jason Basmajian, Brioni, one of the Italian suit makers of record, has shaved 15 years off of its demographic. Under Basmajian, the house is headed in a more youthful—though no less luxe—direction. It's no less tailored, either. "We still believe in the three-piece," Basmajian said. Faith in the suit is one of the big stories in Milan this season, but Brioni is no fair-weather friend. They've been making them for generations.The youth comes in courtesy of slimmer, shorter cuts that hew closer to the body, and lighter constructions and fabrics. (Despite the Fall season, many of the jackets are unlined.) The original Brioni man might not have dreamed of wearing one of his suits with a denim shirt and a knit tie, but the new one would. There are topcoats and car coats the old fellow would recognize, and a new one, the jewel-toned Foglia coat in deep purple double-faced cashmere, that maybe he wouldn't. Brioni is betting that if you build it right—right to the tune of 5,000 hand stitches per jacket, 80 percent of them hidden invisibly on the inside—they will come. When you're talking about a sporty suede hooded parka fully lined in mink, that pilgrimage starts to look like a trip to Lourdes.But luxury has a way of curdling if it's worn without some levity. Brioni addressed the fact head-on with a presentation starring both models and real men, chatting, playing poker, hanging out. They included a handful of Italian businessmen, the spirits heir and perfume-maker Kilian Hennessy, and Vegard Vik, chief of special services for the Oslo police.
15 January 2012
Our review will be posted shortly. See the complete collection by clicking the image at left.
19 June 2011
Diana Ross' disco hit "Upside Down" is a lot to take at 11:30 on a Sunday morning. You could sense it sapping the audience's goodwill toward Alessandro Dell'Acqua and his second outing for Brioni well before the third chorus came round. Backstage, the designer said he took Ross and Florinda Bolkan as muses, the chanteuse providing the glam and the Brazilian actress the sophistication. Good thing the clothes weren't as literal as the music.Dell'Acqua has been tasked with broadening Brioni's customer base, enticing the kind of client who pays attention to the trends but isn't beholden to them. For Fall, he's giving her color: bright fuchsia pants in the tapering, cropped cut of the season, worn under a camel coat belted with a thin gold chain; or a royal purple satin dress bustled in the back and topped by a black cardigan. He's giving her fur and exotic skins; together, the cropped fox jacket and toffee-colored matte crocodile skirt were the definition of Brioni luxe. In between, there were more understated offerings. Both a long-sleeved, fitted black dress with a peephole in the back and a camel cashmere tunic with matching cuffed trousers had subtle appeal. But luxury is about the complete package. Next season's mission will be upgrading the little details like the soundtrack, the venue, etc. that are so vital to the overall message.
26 February 2011
Alessandro Dell'Acqua is the new man at Brioni. His arrival is a positive development for the brand's women's collection, which has lately been designed by a team whose collections have seemed tricked-out and overworked. Today, Dell'Acqua's minimalist approach produced some classic basics—a black pantsuit with full legs paired with a black cotton voile button-down, for example, or a white linen short-sleeve shirt that matched its cropped and tapered pants. Menswear coats were tossed over the shoulder of a long belted dress and a T-shirt and floor-length sequin skirt combo.Sharp tailoring was the focus—no surprise, given that Brioni is responsible for some of the finest-made menswear there is. But it wasn't all strict. Dell'Acqua loves lingerie fabrics, and feminine touches have always been the hallmarks of his own collections. So, there was lace in the mix, as well as subtle tone-on-tone embroidery at the neckline of a tunic dress. The designer is also a close observer of trends. Cases in point: the opening group of all-white looks, the long lengths, and some great flat sandals in braided leather. All in all, this was a step in the right direction.
25 September 2010
Established in Rome in 1945 by master tailor Nazareno Fonticoli and fashion designer Gaetano Savini, Brioni—named after an Adriatic resort—has become synonymous with top-notch menswear, attracting customers like Gary Cooper, Kofi Annan, and of course, Pierce Brosnan as James Bond. In 2001, the company ventured into womenswear, and this season marks the debut of Spanish designer Cristina Ortiz, an alum of Lanvin, Prada, and MaxMara. Inspired, she said, by "round, sensual" forms, Ortiz imagined not a woman who would wear men's clothes, but rather a "companion to the Brioni man." This translated into a sharp black trench with a high collar and puff sleeves, and some body-loving dresses, as well as some dissections of the smoking. Rendered mostly in black ("to get my message across quickly"), with touches of red, the collection was best at its strictest and, appropriately for Brioni, most tailored.
19 February 2006