NEW ROADS

Italian luxury menswear brand Zegna has quietly but surely embarked on a new direction. Its Artistic Director Alessandro Sartori tells us why this one makes all the difference.

- Gordon Ng.

Family names are a funny thing. In many cultures in the past, people used to be named for the work they did— Brewer, Carpenter, Hunter, Cook and so on. Which makes it sweetly serendipitous that Alessandro Sartori, the 56-year-old Creative Director of Zegna, has a last name descended from tailors and the sartorial tradition.

When Sartori rejoined Ermenegildo Zegna in 2016, it was a homecoming of sorts. The Italian designer started his career there in 1989, and between 2003 and 2011 was the sporty Z Zegna line’s founding creative director. Back in 2016, his remit was officially creative oversight of all three of Zegna’s brands: the Couture runway collections, the Ermenegildo Zegna mainline and Z Zegna.

In hindsight, that separation of runway, commercial and diffusion lines seems like a relic of decades-old luxury business strategy. The Zegna of today is, to put it plainly, vastly different. In 2021, it dropped ‘Ermenegildo’ from the brand name and absorbed all sub-lines into a single, unified collection.

“Before, there were three different collections, three different studios, three different projects,” Sartori recalls. “People were buying different things and the images we were building were different. Now, it’s easier. There’s one line, one image and one perceived silhouette.”