Even before news leaked that Stefano Pilati was designing a capsule for Zara, close watchers of the Berlin-based, Italian-born designer knew something was coming. On Instagram, Pilati had been engaging in a sort of comeback tour, posting images of past runway shows, red carpet moments, and advertising campaigns from his days at YSL, where he was creative director from 2004 to 2012, and reminiscing about their creation.
Now, the day is here: the reveal of a collection of clothes and accessories for women and men, which has been shot by Steven Meisel and stars Gisele Bundchen and Pilati himself.
Pilati has known Marta Ortega Perez, the chair of Inditex, Zara’s parent company, for 10 years, and says they’ve often talked about working together in the past. When the offer finally came back in January, Pilati was all-in. “I said, ‘let’s do it.’ It seemed very straightforward and fun for me. It was also a different way to approach designing from what I’m doing with Random.”
Random Identities is the gender fluid label Pilati launched in 2017, after four years designing at Zegna. In fact, Ortega Perez’s original brief was to do a men’s collection for Zara. It was to be a tribute to Pilati’s own verve with clothes, which has been long admired. In 2016, this website put him at the top of a list of the most stylish men in fashion. “To me,” Sally Singer wrote at the time, “Stefano Pilati is the epitome of fearless, intuitive elegance: always intensely masculine, but those cuts, those fabrics, the tattoos, the jewelry.”