The Voice of Fashion
Zegna: Family, Forest, Fabric and Fashion
The 112-year-old Italian luxury group’s reforestation and community initiatives segueing into fashion matter more today as the plot for climate justice thickens
A day before Italian design powerhouse Zegna showed its Spring Summer 2023 collection at the Oasi Zegna in the Biella Alps of Piedmont in Italy last month, the brand’s artistic director Alessandro Sartori, laid bare the wit and vitality of the “modular wardrobe”. Sartori, tall in form, subtle in demeanour, erudite in expression, dressed in all black, was working at the Zegna headquarters in Milan in his trademark triple-stitch sneakers. In black of course.
Sartori’s chosen pieces from the collection enter the room on male models. He argues for elevating the knowhow of craftspeople to luxury, the age of modern tailoring, how the terry has become a fabric for a suit, but the suit is no longer formal. What the colours of the Oasi in summer mean to him and why a shapeless, silken, tailored, travel blazer could be the over-shirt, the shirt or the coat.
At one fell swoop, Sartori brings up timeliness and timelessness knitting a stitch between two elastic concepts. “Now, the way of (my) designing is different,” he says. “I fuse much more, research much more. I fuse garments in a way that when you buy a knit, it can be a shirt, an over-shirt or a top. So actually the modern concept of wearing it differently is ‘new’. I like to call it the New Zegna,” he says.
Zegna acquired a ‘new’ burnish last year in December when the group, with Gildo Zegna as its CEO, was listed on the New York Stock Exchange and began trading as a public company under the ticker ‘ZGN’. The rebranding was through a merger with a special purpose acquisition company sponsored by Investindustrial. For a group that had resisted public listing for at least two decades, due to difference of opinion within the family, it is surely a ‘new’ direction.
But Sartori’s ‘new’—also the focus of this story—is artistic. It is contextualised in Zegna’s attempt over the last few years to ‘reset’ fashion. Even before Zoomwear became a thing and wardrobes were forced to lose weight.
Zegna’s Spring/Summer 2023 showcase, part of the Milan Fashion Week, was held at Oasi Zegna.
In The Age of Climate Justice
As climate change discourses heat up every section of society from the sciences to the arts, media to policy, technology to fashion, work out their own climate politics, a generational gap seems to have sprung up. The presumption is that young people, or the millennials and Gen Z respond to the environmental crisis in a dynamic, call-to-action manner while older populations must be moralised to wake up and change their set patterns. Succinctly put, different generations respond to climate change differently. Or, what German-American psychologist Erik Erikson called the tug between “generativity” and “stagnation”.
At Zegna though, there has been a consistent, four-generation response to sustaining people and the planet. The founder Ermenegildo Zegna authored it and subsequent generations follow it like the Gospel Truth. That’s why the symbolic and real story behind Oasi Zegna, the 112-year old forest acquires crucial significance today. As the largest sustainability-centred initiative by any luxury fashion brand in the world, its open secrets, examined anew could inspire individuals, fashion activism groups, fabric manufacturers, trekkers and fashion pundits today.
That is why we must go back to the trees where the secrets live.
Oasi Zegna: The Family and the Forest
A week before meeting Sartori in Milan, I went to visit the brand’s forest as well as the wool mill and archival unit. The colours and enchantment of the Italian countryside change as the car pulls out of Milan towards the rice fields and lush greens. Once you go uphill past Trivero, which houses Fondazione Zegna, the archival library and museum as well as Lanificio Zegna, the wool mill, the air feels different. The fragrance of the trees swirls around as the forest receives visitors with a green embrace and a mysteriously calming energy. With Zegna team member Matteo Ferrario as my companion, we pause at the final resting place of the late Ermenegildo Zegna.
The story goes that as a child, Ermenegildo, who fathered this brand was one among several children of a modest Italian family. Drawn to community service as a young boy, he would accompany the village priest in Trivero to offer the last solace to those on their death beds. When he grew up to lay the foundation of the region’s first wool mill in 1910 giving employment to the villagers, he wanted to balance nature with nurture. Of firm belief that the villagers would need recreation as much as healthcare besides wages, Ermenegildo founded a school, a maternity hospital and began the biggest reforestation drive in the then barren landscape. To him, production, social welfare and environmental responsibility were connected and he envisioned a forest as an escape and oasis for the villagers.
He began to plant trees.
Made public in 1993, Road 232, the scenic path to Oasi Zegna takes you to that idyllic forest in the Biella Alps in Piedmont, Italy. Spread over 100 square kilometres, through 1,420 hectares of woods and 170 hectares of pasture, it has more than 500,000 pine, fir and spruce trees. It functions as a unique open-air laboratory looked after by the family, particularly Anna Zegna, one of the three grandchildren of Ermenegildo and the sister of Gildo and Paolo Zegna.
This year, Oasi Zegna has been internationally certified by the FSC® standard for forest management and ecosystem services for the community. If you stay at the wood-crafted Albergo Bucaneve hotel in the forest with balconies looking out to the Biella Alps, the bells on the sheep grazing on the hills till late evening will rock you to gentle slumber. Next morning the scent of pine trees brings home a sun kissed new day. The food is entirely made with locally sourced ingredients, and tastes deliciously homemade.
“Visitors are enthralled by the spell of the forest, they feel lighter and happier in a healing sense, ” says Arturo Ramella Bagneri, an experienced excursion guide, also a friend of the woods. He takes me on a walking tour of the “Smiling Forest” as it is named. A transporting calm radiating from the trees you hug, the mystical play of light and shadow on the woods as the clouds practise ballet above are indeed smile-inducing. A cloak of green-blue, ochre and yellow of the flowering trees, dresses you. “Trees have eyes here so be careful”, says Bagneri laughing as he points to etchings on some tree trunks that look like human eyes. He talks about the untold secrets of the forest, how epigenetics work and why trees survive geological and tectonic shifts in the earth as well as the stress of climate change.
Forest trees are long-living organisms. Despite repeated environmental hazards, storms, natural calamities, degradation, epigenetic mechanisms remain stable through the life of a tree, even across generations. That they rear and cheer human beings is the stuff of many a folk tale and ritualistic beliefs in different parts of the world. From India’s worship of the great Banyan tree to the myths behind Indonesia’s ‘dancing trees’ on the island of Sumba, tree lore is ancient and persistent.
The Zegna family’s commitment to what it must sustain and how—keeping the fine balance between people and surroundings—is akin to a long-living tree. Even when stressed by the changing materiality of fashion, the hammering pressures of business in a post-pandemic world, it stays rooted.
The Long Life of #UseTheExisting
Sartori, as artistic director, extends this philosophy. With his words and work, he blurs the sharp lines between formal and leisure wear, between tailored and crafted—taking down boundaries that once made style a chore.
#Usetheexisting, Zegna’s recycling project to enable Zero Waste initiated in 2019 makes complete sense once you reach the forest and visit Fondazione Zegna.
This June, Sartori showed his collection at Oasi Zegna—something he has done before—taking the clothes back to the incubating environment. The location rivets his opinions on menswear and the rationale behind fewer collections each year. Alongside, offering fine bespoke in superlative fabrics remains Zegna’s favourite suit. “Today, menswear has different, elaborate means. Liveliness is important, comfort with shape is important, new needs like travelling are important. Garments need to be adapted to these and that’s why I fuse craft and the modernity. We have a vast number of technologies at the atelier and we can transform (menswear) with them,” says Sartori.
He could well be speaking for Riz Ahmed’s dull rose Zegna suit that the British-Pakistani actor wore to the Oscars this year. (Ahmed, a Zegna friend, picked up his first Academy Award for the film The Long Goodbye which he starred in and co-wrote.) Or Sartori could be talking about Dev Patel and Javier Bardem, two diverse and powerful actors who have starred in the brand’s campaign films. In 2017 they were seen in Arrival, and later in 2021 in the Defining Moments series directed by Craig McDeen and Sartori.
Fondazione Zegna narrates the century-old tale of the brand and the family.
Roots and Shoots: Archiving To Remake
Zegna which acquired the American “suit revolutionising” brand Thom Browne in 2018 now has 500 boutiques in 80 countries. 6,100 employees work with the company which has seven textile divisions. Over the years, its acquisition of historian Italian companies that make extraordinary fibres and yarns has also led to the formation of the Made in Italy Luxury Textile Laboratory Platform.
On the drive down from the Biella Alps, when we return to Fondazione Zegna in Trivero, which houses the museum and the archival unit, the sheep to shop, forest to family, fabric to fashion linkages needs no translation. They flash like reflector signs.
Later, when I spot the cute, miniature sheep models swathed in different varieties and colours of merino wool as visual merchandising objects at the Zegna store on Via Monte Napoleone in Milan, I want to wave at the sheep. We have met before.
It is all traceable, circular and connected. You become a part of the narrative by hugging a tree, holding refined fabrics at the wool mill, or touching with tentative hands a 112-year old handwritten diary by Ermenegildo.
Besides the extraordinary Oasi Cashmere which is 70 per cent cashmere and 30 per cent linen, the wool for which comes from locally nurtured sheep, Zegna sources merino wool from a farm in New South Wales in Australia. Here, 10,000 sheep live on an open grazing farm over 2,500 acres of land.
All yarns, wools, fibres, fabrics, ways of weaving, looming and processing are archived at Fondazione Zegna. One part of this hill-facing building that implodes with natural light houses the museum. It narrates the century-old tale of the brand and the family. The narration meanders through celebrity endorsements and red carpet appearances, tailoring feats, community activities, awards, rewards, iconic objects, fashion shows and collections over the years, the most sold suits, themes interpreted by the brand to mark special years. Besides the suitcases, hats, boxes, knapsacks, shoes and several personal items of the Zegna family members.
The other part is the archival division. It pays homage in compelling ways to Ermenegildo and not just by the painstaking preservation of his personal diaries—all with black or red covers that have handwritten notes describing the ‘recipe’ of each fabric he created in the wool mill, with clear sketches that explain texture, stitch and fabric specificities. “Ermenegildo was so meticulous to keep a double copy of the Lanificio textile sample books, starting from the first fabric he created in 1910 and every season he updated his personal notebook with all the information essential for operations of the Wool Mill,” a spokesperson tells me.
While the Zegna archive is meticulous and prolific, it is not just local. It receives documents from the global Zegna network, ideates publications and projects that travel far and dialogues with guests that visit the Fondazione.
Zegna Archival Museum, Trivero
One part of the hill-facing Fondazione Zegna, that implodes with natural light, houses the museum.
The Wool Mill
Little surprise then, that when Zegna celebrated 100 years in 2010, the centennial fabric was re-created at the Wool Mill using the founder’s recipe. Lanificio, the spine of the group’s work is known as a house of functional, refined fabrics used by the brand as well as sourced by luxury fashion and textile companies across the world. The sentiment of continuance without fuss echoes over the drone of the machines at Lanificio. My guide Valentina Segnan, a dimpled, articulate and well-informed young lady echoes the Zegna ideology without reading a script. Yarn carding and spooling, quality control, dyeing and processing, innovation and technology, human hands collaborating with machines, colours and collections, the backend of Sartori’s reachouts to the fashion and design world are all here to see. The ‘cardi’ catches my eye. These are natural thistle heads picked from the forest and combined with technology for cleaning fabrics before the final stage.
All concepts take a U-turn to ‘traceability’.
Rites and Rights: Why Lexicon Matters
Among Sartori’s charms is his lexicon that matches the philosophy he works with. His communication isn’t fastidious or frazzled, but direct. Asked if the right language helps communicating climate change, sustainability and conservation especially for a fashion brand that must be pressurised by ‘trend-setting’ expectations, he is astute. “I am a big believer in the meaning of the word, that’s why we try to use perfect words. Customers come to the stores and ask what you mean by ‘traceable’ and we tell them the full story. They can see photos on their phones of Oasi Zegna or the regions in the world where we collect wool. Like freshness, sustainability, craft and modernity all are important in this vocabulary. It is like a collection inspired by Oasi Zegna and sent to different places in the world.”
Banner: A collage of menswear looks from Zegna’s SS23 collection collaged against the green expanse of Oasi Zegna. All images courtesy, Zegna
