ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA Couture FW2014/15 @ City & Nature Collection

ERMENEGILDO ZEGNA Couture FW2014/15 City & Nature Collection contextualising fashion. Defining its aesthetic value.Researching an absolute vision responding logically to market demands.

Historically the emotional impulse to build has always been inspired by the beauty and majesty of nature. For Zegna nature is strength, progress and research. A journey from and towards the primordial universe is shown to define the origin of the brand. Building on spring-summer’s union of industry and savoir-faire, the new autumn-winter collection celebrates natural fibers, exploring and validating Zegna’s patrimonial, historical and technological identity.

Stefano Pilati explores, tracks, confirms and combines absolute concepts by relativising their origins: merging the formal with sportswear; dark tones with light; nuances to graphisms; textures to surfaces; functionality to frivolity; natural to synthetic. Fine wool, noble cashmere and precious vicuña are worn with traditional British hunting covert fabrics; Japanese nylon; silk or wool woven with Cordura or Kevlar.

Sporty looks become elegant, formal is presented in layers of precious fabrics, defining a silhouette that seems identical yet performs in opposite ways according to construction. Another exercise in style that Stefano Pilati uses to symbolise the relative evidence of appearance, offering a luxurious outfit from a unique and “elevated” perspective.

Artisan-made boots constructed with sublime craftsmanship are modernised by the use of thermal bonding techniques. Patinated skins finish the look of an urban explorer; whose original style, classic and unregulated in its formality, emphasises the Zegna identity. A truly universal aesthetic message with a precise stylistic journey, philosophically and conceptually absolute that looks into the origins that define a new future.

The soundtrack is inspired by silence that appears to belong to the space, but it’s not. Instead a silence of spatial sounds, thanks to the work of Professor Terenzi in Acoustic Astronomy, is mixed with The Seasons Autumn Song - Op. 37b by Tchaikovsky and the sounds of contemporary urban life, symbolically represented by the absolute melodies of cities selected by Stefano Pilati; New York jazz, Shanghai traditional music and Milan opera. 

A real scientific path traced by astrophysicist Fiorella Terenzi, Professor of Astronomy at the International University of Florida, and also thanks to the collaboration of Professor Neil deGrasse Tyson, director of Hayden Planetarium at the Rose Center for Earth and Space and research associate in the department of astrophysics at the Amecian Museum of Natural History, who have formulated a set of trajectories created in unique movement that fuse the primordial universe with the Milan CityLife Palace.