Alessandro Sartori the Artistic Director of Italian fashion house Ermenegildo Zegna, talks design, legacy, his true passions and why now is the perfect time to launch the latest campaign What Makes a Man.
Alessandro Sartori has truly succeeded in ensuring that legacy, craftmanship and modernity perfectly meet since taking on his role at Ermenegildo Zegna. His modern and forward thinking designs have gone from strength to strength since he became Artistic Director in 2016. Now, with the What Makes a Man campaign, Sartori opens a new chapter for the brand. One the starts a conversation and addresses the personalities and emotions of men rather than just what they wear on a material level.
We met with Sartori in New York for the launch of the campaign and sat down to discuss the conversation he is starting and why it is such an important conversation to be having in 2019.
How did the What Makes a Man campaign come to life?
The lifestyle we are envisioning at Zegna is not only about a clothing silhouette, it is about a persona, someone that has his own life, feelings and emotions. We meet people around the world every day as tailors, doing fittings in people’s apartments etc. and I always get into these topics. It’s been a part of our daily conversation since I first joined Zegna. When we meet these people, conversations are happening, we start opening Pandora’s Box of fabrics and models and at the same time we start to talk with them about their lives. And it is these conversations that we constantly have within our team about our clients and also about our friends and ambassadors, what are they thinking and how do they live and express their masculinity? There is not one answer or one definition, there are in fact many and many of these that are very private and personal. So we decided to open this conversation because we think it is important to discover the truth of Zegna, after the clothes.
Who is the man that you are designing for today?
He’s not one man, he is a cluster of different characters and people from every part of the world. It is very inclusive. We did our last show at the Central Station in Milan and we talked about diversity and standing out, so it is this idea of a huge broad casting, more than a specific ethnicity or character. It is embodying a very inclusive approach and delving into a unique opinion.
What are the prerequisites when you are choosing brand ambassadors?
Authenticity, credibility and a very honest approach to what they do and a very open point of view. The reason why we chose Mahershala Ali was not for the advertising, it’s because we have been working with him for years, but there was one time in LA when we had a fitting for him and he came himself rather than sending the stylist because he wanted to meet the people behind the brand and see what we were doing. He explained his approach to fabrics and his relationship with his father and how he used to go home with beautiful suits, and we actually felt that he should become one of our friends and we then explained the concept of the campaign and that’s when we decided to work together. So it’s always organic and natural, most of these people are our customers and friends before being ambassadors.
What defines you as a man and what are three characteristics that you are proud of?
First of all being honest to myself. That’s something that I am particularly proud of. Secondly is to love what I like to love. To love and to be open to love whom and what I like to love. Thirdly is that I don’t consider private and professional life to be split and I choose to be happy in what I do – so if I work 16 hours it’s because I like to work 16 hours, not because I’m paid to do the work and little by little this is something that I’m working on that’s giving me a lot of satisfaction.
What is something that you haven’t done yet that you would still like to achieve?
The work we are doing is constantly transforming. There are so many layers we can touch and this campaign is one example. Some of these layers we treat like the idea of recovering the waste and transforming, with the new fabrics. Some of our projects I’m still working on, and I think my mission is to accomplish all the ideas I had.
How is Zegna moving forward in terms of sustainability?
It is a mindset and process. We have a lot of layers and Zegna is now one of 32 companies who signed The Fashion Pact. The company however has always been focused around sustainability. The factories producing our fabrics now, are sustainable as far as energy goes, because they produce energy from water that is used by the company and is totally eco-friendly. This is just one example. There are so many. I’m very interested in the Carbon Footprint and waste. So we use sustainable cashmere and leather, we re-use water within the production of our clothes, we try not to create a lot of waste and we use a very clean process.
On top of that I think a big part is how we move the pieces to the final customer and what we do with the waste. There are so many issues with waste today be it with food or clothes, waste is a big thing that we all need to consider. During the journey from the initial raw material to the final fabric that is used to make the garment, fifty per cent of what was collected initially is gone. It’s like saying your car is losing fifty per cent of its gas before getting to the engine. So to organise a new process where this fifty per cent is reduced down to thirty or twenty and then to use that waste to create something new, is something I am working on. It’s also a mindset that I’m working on with my design team and as far as everything that goes into the garments – lining, padding, trimming etc. – everything is affected.
Zegna is a brand that has a great legacy. What is the strategy you use when you are designing to make sure you respect this legacy but also appeal to the young modern crowd?
First of all we perfectly know the rules of our savoir-faire. Not just the style but also the make and the way things are made. We use our own vintage pieces when we make new collections and the main reason for this is is not to check the details or the style, but to open the garments and check how they were made before. If you see that a jacket has the possibility to be reduced one size but enlarged one size as many of our pieces did, it will date back to the forties and fifties as everything that was a little costly was cut after that to make production less expensive. Actually we go back to the roots and we all know how these little details were done. There are so many techniques and rules to these things and this is part of the legacy, as well as knowing there is a strong legacy in using the most beautiful fabrics. So we are totally attached to the craft, as far as the legacy is concerned, but we work forward as far as the style is concerned.
What are we expecting to see from you next year?
Another big step forward. I am a big fan of collecting garments, and mixing the old and new, and I am a big fan of adding layers. It means that in the future collections you will see this and you will see what masculinity means today. There will be beautiful cashmere and wool that we create from an organic process in Australia. There are other layers that we will be unveiling that are important in which we are creating a new language.
When you want to be inspired and clear your mind, what do you do?
I need to be connected with my passions aside from fashion. These are art, photography and classic cars. These are particularly interesting to me because I seem them as a way to refresh my mind. What I really like about modern art and photography is the self-expression of an individual and their artistic point of view. When I see photography by photographers I really love, I feel that after the picture that you see at first, there is the message within the colours, perspectives, angles etc. and that attracts me a lot.
As far as classic cars are concerned I’ll tell you a little story. A friend of mine is a very well-known car designer. When he used to work at BMW he was the guy that designed the new Mini and when we met I asked him about it. It was interesting because the Mini wasn’t a new project. First of all he told me he didn’t design it alone and he told me how he had very little time and he was very nervous because himself and the team, they didn’t know how to connect the past and the future. He was very disconnected with the idea of having something that was an old car, but it needed to be new. So they decided to decorate four rooms within their studio based around four decades. The first the seventies, was full of orginal Minis from that era as well as photography, music and movies of the seventies. Then they created the room of the eighties, nineties etc. without any car. They then designed two cars that were never made – the Mini of the eighties and the Mini of the nineties – he has them in his sketchbook. Then at the end he was able to design the car of 2000s. He said that he wanted to act like it was an evolution, not a revolution. So they designed two cars that were never made in order to help them get there. I think what is particularly important is to be connected but to evolve. This to me is the best story that explains not only this success but also other successes and it is a legacy, with a mind that looks forward.
If you were to describe the What Makes a Man campaign in one word, what word would you use?
One word is difficult! In four words I would say ‘we open the conversation’. We do not want to define what the man has to be or what masculinity is, we don’t want to be pretentious, but we want to open a conversation because there are a lot of different feelings, emotions and types of people so we think it’s important to open the question and to receive different answers.
What is a life lesson that you can share with us?
When creating this campaign I saw a lot of different things, some of these were known to me already, some weren’t. But basically I came to the conclusion that normally when you do a photoshoot, you have a very strict idea of what you want to achieve and explore around that. This advertising campaign however was all about the journey, then we got the result. So the idea was living in the moment and being open to different emotions, because we wanted these emotions to come out even before the photo. And there I learnt something that I really like, it’s not my own sentence but it is something I’ve seen in a book and that is ‘life is a journey, it’s not where we want to go.’ And this is exactly what’s behind this campaign. The journey of creating it makes it exactly what it is today. It was totally free and out of the barriers.
By Lara Mansour Sawaya
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