When you enter Villa Zegna on New York’s Upper East Side, the first thing you see is a long wool coat. The subtly checked garment once belonged to the house’s founder, Ermenegildo Zegna. It now hangs in the brand’s fashion week private club alongside other mementos from his 1938 trip to the American city, where he met and established relations with stateside Italian tailors.
There’s a model of the ship he sailed over on, his handwritten logs, a Western Union Cablegram announcing his arrival, and his faded leather handbag. Past this wall of memories, the private club opens into a manufactured trip through Oasi Zegna: a part-compound, part-natural territory in the Italian Alps where Ermenegildo built a township around his wool mill and other family properties. Today, Zegna’s fabrics are still sourced from the area, and the reforestation efforts Ermenegildo began have continued—among other projects, one tree is planted for every baby born into the company.
“It’s the new retail. It’s a new way of building relationships … because we can have more time,” says Artistic Director Alessandro Sartori of the relationship private clubs and other activations build with the house’s clientele. Villa Zegna—which has also made stops in Milan and Shanghai—turns VIP shopping into a destination experience. This kind of brand ingenuity is coveted at a time when drawing customers out of their homes, or capturing their attention, is the hardest won battle. This fashion week, Sartori sat down with CULTURED to share how Zegna is pushing into the 21st-century economy, without losing sight of its storied history.
CULTURED: Installations like Villa Zegna, they’re a new way to connect with people.
Alessandro Sartori: We were, for a long time, trying to understand how to engage differently, because the stores are, of course, offering a lot of services including private rooms, tailors, made-to-measure, stylists... I like this additional experience, because it’s part of the language. When you design fashion, if you want it to be delivered exactly as you want, these experiences connect the dots. If your collection goes somewhere where it is not presented well, where it's not explained, where the values are not told, your work is not complete.
CULTURED: How does this installation expand the customers' understanding of the brand? How do you hope they see it?
Sartori: We are always speaking about trends and directions, and what is going to be, and all that. But I’m a big believer that we can’t speak about trends and fashion in a generic way. If the garment is less expensive, you could change it many times, and it could last less [long]. But when a garment is expensive, when more is handmade, when quality is more visible, the garment should last longer. If this is expensive, it doesn’t need to be classic. Not at all. Being long-lasting doesn't need to be classic. It needs to be designed and produced for that—so its shape goes with many outfits, it's an amazing quality, durable fabric, very resilient construction and stitching. We see that customers are willing to know more about what I’m saying—to get quality, to understand how to wear the pieces.
CULTURED: With this installation and your reforestation efforts, it seems that this sustainable mindset, or transparency, is built into the company. Is that something you find customers are more aware of, or are looking for more than they may have been 10 years ago?
Sartori: Correct. One hundred percent. First of all, I’m a big believer that one day, one generation will wake up and say, “I am not going to wear any more of this and this and this brands, because we don’t have this and this values behind it.” I already see people telling me, “I will not work for this brand because they are doing this. I would never work for that brand.” Work and being employed is, of course, very important. We all work for a living, but it is not enough any longer. You want to be part of a small community where you feel you are respecting your vision.
Going back to your question, I think that this will be deeper and deeper, and we will go even further in the future. Yes, we need to do a good collection. Yes, we need to do business. Yes, we need to do a profitable balance. Yes, we need to have beautiful stores. Yes, we need to satisfy our customers. But, first of all, we need to be honest, sell at a high quality, being a respecter of the vision of the company—being sustainable and innovative.
Lately, we created the Oasi Linen and the Oasi Cashmere. We don’t use linen or cashmere [from] outside of Oasi. They are both fully traceable, but [not] because we buy a certificate from someone that said, “This has been made here.” We have our own team at the source, and we produce everything internally. Once it's the right time to collect it, we send it to our own spinning company, and then to our own weaving company, and to our own finishing company. Everything is following a process, and this process is at the core of our values.
CULTURED: Do you find that focus on fabrics and materials shows up in your design progress?
Sartori: Let me tell you, I’ve changed very much the way I design and my approach to design. I was one of the designers changing every season according to the seasons—getting inspired by a specific moment or a book I was reading. But since we did the rebranding [in 2021, ahead of going public], we have decided to focus on one main direction—that is uncomplicated, chic luxury. Details are arriving mostly from the old, handmade tailoring, even if we’re talking about sportswear sometimes. So, maybe it's a tailoring rule applied to a bomber or a trench. The colors are 50 percent new for the season, 50 percent forever in the Zegna color palette—such as the foliage color or the bright, deep blue or the off-white, vanilla color.
CULTURED: What are you looking forward to this season?
Sartori: We just introduced our summer collection. It was related to this idea of golden colors, bold colors, and a full silhouette, but uncomplicated design—at first. Actually, the garments are kind of complicated, but when you see it from outside, you get the simple feeling. So, shirts are becoming jackets, jackets are becoming torrential outerwear. This hybrid [model] is part of a new way of thinking, where you wear the garment, but you blend your silhouette. I like this idea of multiple possibilities, a modular system, inside my old vision and style. [I like] to elevate myself to my best, as I like to elevate customers to the best version of themselves.
CULTURED: Looking uncomplicated is a classic way of thinking about style. How can you make something that actually took a lot of time and effort look effortless?
Sartori: It’s like when you start cycling when you are a kid. You go and you go, and suddenly you stay, and you have balance. When you build your own silhouette, it's similar. Before, you are not confident, and then you try, you need to do some mistakes, and you need to do some experimentation, and then you have a moment where you understand yourself, your proportions, and what you look good with. And once you are confident, and you know some tools, you can build it.
