What thoughts would go through your head if you arrived at a work dinner, scanned the place cards, and saw that you were seated next to Sofia Coppola or Richie Tenenbaum? That was the surprise awaiting a small group of editors in Milan last week. It’s a scenario that exists outside the bounds of possibility (for starters, Richie is a fictional character)—but not that of the imagination of Lessico Familiare, an Italian brand you might not have never heard of. Founded during the pandemic by Riccardo Scaburri, Alice Curti, and Alberto Petillo, the brand adapted its name from a 1963 book by Natalia Ginzburg, Lessico Famigliare, that documented everyday life in Italy between 1920 and 1950. Similarly, everything LF does is very close to home and based on what already exists, using upcycled materials, many of them interior textiles. This trio defines luxury as something unique and hand-made, and all of their pieces are one-offs.
Small indie off-schedule brands are rare in Italy’s industrial and sophisticated fashion center, and the LF team is persevering like a flower growing through a crack in concrete. This season they’ve been lent a hand by kindred iconoclastic spirits, Sunnei’s Simone Rizzo and Loris Messina, who issued the following statement: “When everything is done to get something back, Sunnei dedicates itself to Lessico Familiare with the sole desire to see a young reality in Milan manage to focus on its potential. In a gesture that goes beyond blablabla, Sunnei opens the doors of its own HQ, both physically and metaphorically, to welcome the presentation of the new collection, whose purity has instead been maintained without any Sunneian contamination.”
Sunnei was hands-off, but irony and camp left their marks on the lineup, which riffs on an artwork that hung in Scaburri’s aunt’s house, a spoof on Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper in which pop culture icons were subbed in for Jesus and his disciples. From that, Scaburri came up with his own list of dream dinner guests. It’s an eclectic group which includes Nina Simone and Martin Luther, Sofia Coppola and Cecilia Lisbon, a character from The Virgin Suicides. The LF team found favored images of each person and recreated their attire from them, using materials at hand. Mr. Darcy, for example, wears a McDonald’s uniform shirt that was treated to some embellishments, and the pink dress Gwyneth Paltrow wore for her Shakespeare in Love Oscar win was created using home textiles. In the process of moving Scaburri found a treasure trove of materials and says that the “fil rouge” running through the collection is the curtain ruffles used on almost every look.
The collection examines how we consume culture in the postmodern digital world, and takes its title from the ubiquitous and vapid online response “Literally me.” When Scaburri says it in the context of this collection, he really means it: “I have all these characters tattooed on my body,” he states.