‘The beauty of this project is its reduced
dimensions. Being limited in scale makes
the work more dynamic and autonomous’
SMALL MARBLE SLABS – TRAWLED FROM
ROME’S KEY ARCHEOLOGICAL SITES – LINE
PORTALUPPI’S MILAN APARTMENT (LEFT).
THE ARCHITECT’S HOME INSPIRED THE LATEST
EDITION OF EDITED (BELOW)The Milan-born designer, formerly creative
director of Halston, Rochas and Schiaparelli,
and an alumnus of Versace and Dolce
& Gabbana, turned his back on Paris and
New York for a home-town brand.
At Santoni, Zanini’s purview has been
the introduction of a carefully considered
handful of designs – the top tier of the
company’s footwear offerings, but also its
first lines of men’s and women’s apparel,
a pared-down capsule collection of timeless
wardrobe essentials he calls Edited.
‘The beauty of this project is its reduced
dimensions. Being limited in scale makes
the work more dynamic and autonomous
than at giant corporations,’ he says, rolling
his eyes skyward at the thought of past
frustrations. ‘Now I’m free of certain
deadlines. And I’m not contending with
500 cooks in the kitchen.’
‘Less is better,’ agrees Angelo Flaccavento,
fashion journalist and Zanini’s collaborator
on the Edited project. ‘Today we’re drowningin products that are mostly pointless.
This project is different,’ he says.
At a time when designers complain
of the fashion industry’s cyclical strictures
and a ceaseless pressure to produce, the
limited scale of the Edited collection allows
the pair time to contemplate and experiment.
At Santoni, Zanini kicks off each
collection not with sketches but with a visual
and verbal concept, put together with
Flaccavento, that becomes a book when the
clothing collection is complete. ‘Recounting
a collection this way reveals Marco’s ideas
in designing it, with his universe of references
condensed into a jacket or a dress,’ says
Flaccavento. ‘I could never design clothes,’ he
continues, ‘but it’s important to have not just
a visual person but a verbal person. And to be
a curator, or to be a journalist, is the same
mindset because the starting point is analysis.’
The latest outing of Edited has drawn on
Portaluppi’s home, and the book features
images of his kaleidoscopic marble collection
that still lines wood shelves in the living room
(the 1,500 little marble slabs, all cut to the
same size, were assembled by a young
geologist in Rome in the mid-19th century,
who trawled the city’s archaeological sites).
Architecture lasts. Marble lasts. To relay
the story of the clothes with these images is
a rejection of today’s over-evanescent fashion
world, Zanini argues. The hardbound volume
is filled with quasi-psychedelic close-ups of
stones: the blood-red veins of a rosy marble
and the painterly amber rings of a fossilised
wood, interspersed with very occasional
coolly moody images of the collection.
It’s understatement as a communication
tool, but then Zanini is motivated by
rejection as much as creation, having traded
glitzier opportunities for the chance to create
exactly what he wants: ‘an edit of things that
don’t change every six months, designed
to accompany the wearer in the long term’,
as he explains. There are no extraneous
details, no wild cards in this soft-spoken,
cerebral collection; only finely wrought basics
rendered in his signature subdued palette.
In an industry shackled by fast-paced
production and almost instant irrelevance,
it’s the brave designer who abandons
the limelight to create what can endure. ∂^
Santoni Edited by Marco Zanini, santonishoes.com088 ∑
Fashion