Italy’s new look

Forget pinstripes and playboys. Pal Zileri’s new creative director is bringing about the return of the Venetian dandy

The blare of Milan traffic echoes outside the window, along with a few choice Italian phrases as the city’s rush hour gets underway, but Rocco Iannone’s mind is elsewhere. ‘The shades of the lagoon with that grey opal colour, the rust colours of the Doge’s Palace, the intense blue of the sky… The whole visual language of Venice is poetic,’ says Iannone, the recently appointed creative director of Italian men’s fashion house Pal Zileri, whose first collection debuted last month during Milan Fashion Week Men’s.

Pal Zileri was founded by textile magnates Gianfranco Barizza and Aronne Miola in 1970 as a fabric manufacturer, before branching into a fully fledged men’s style outfit in 1980. But Iannone’s mission for the new era is to turn that industrial background into something more evocative. ‘The company is almost 50 years old, so we do have some heritage, but it’s more in industrial expertise. The jewel that we have is our craft – we know how to create beautiful fabrics and colours.’

That the designer, who worked for a decade in the menswear department at Giorgio Armani, chose the romanticism of the Veneto region as his starting point is no accident. Vicenza has acted as a hub of craft for decades, thanks to its location on historic trade routes from east to west. And it’s where Pal Zileri’s artisans are based. ‘We work in Milan but I go to Vicenza a great deal. The beautiful environment there informs the work,’ Iannone says. ‘There’s a culture to understanding colours and tonality – Venetian paintings are so rich and full of life and light, it’s part of the lifestyle there.’

That painterly hand and soft-focus aesthetic made its way into the designer’s debut collection. He married heritage checks and houndstooth with a contemporary ease and vim: windowpane check blazers in nutmeg and teal, denim shirting, wool coats with plush shearling collars and gleaming velvets and cords that catch the light all appeared on the runway.

‘Exoticism,’ he says, gesturing to a plume of feathers on a lapel. ‘Venice was the gateway to the east, and it’s known for its drama and theatre.’ And this from an Italian men’s fashion house, more traditionally the environs of either solid pinstripe suiting of the Marlon Brando ilk, or slashed-to-thenavel shirts and creaking crocodile jackets favoured by Capri playboys. ‘I wanted the collection to be softer and more fluid. I wanted to bring back a dandyish element,’ he says. ‘Italy still has a very macho attitude towards men’s clothes – you still see men in suits three sizes too small to show off their bodies, and that’s what I want to change.’

Those traditional coats, with their nubbly wools and houndstooth checks, are designed to look like heirlooms from some sartorially switched-on nonno, dusted down and reinterpreted, perhaps with a chunky pair of boots or a leather shirt. ‘I like the idea of a young man who plays with his father’s wardrobe, takes those codes and makes them fresh,’ Iannone says. ‘But no matter what, he’s always a perfect gentleman in how he dresses. It’s relaxed and masculine, but not about machismo.’