The Grand Tour was an early ancestor of today’s mass tourism: the 18th century-onwards trend for the monied classes in Europe’s chilly north to venture south to Italy and Greece in order to broaden their cultural horizons and get away from their parents. This season Brunello Cucinelli and his team flipped that template to make Italy not the destination, but the starting point. These clothes charted a journey from Solomeo in Umbria—the epicenter of Cucinelli’s culture—further south.
In truth, of course, this journey was entirely imagined: every apparent souvenir was handmade in Italy. What the storyline allowed team Cucinelli to play with, however, were the contrasts between the classical structures of his tailoring and more conventional womenswear with the wilder, organically evolved output of his team of knitwear artisans. Exceptional bags and tops were fashioned in fluid sproutings of tobacco-toned macramé yarn in which were integrated metal-set chains of colored stone. There was a dress made of apparently macramé chain. Hand meshed knits were web-like and entirely irregular. These items were real trophies.
Against them were placed sleeveless safari jackets, panamas, clubbishly striped suiting, gauze cotton animalia skirts, cable knits, some cool Monili-tassled suede moccasins, and shirting with metal-embroidered linen cuffs. These pieces were all entirely lovable, but it was the experiments in knitwear—Cucinelli’s founding metier—that were most worth writing home about.