For Italian Men, a Return to Elegance

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For Italian Men, a Return to Elegance

The Berlusconi years were tough on men’s fashion in Italy. But
now there seems to be a return to traditional sartorial values.

By GUY TREBAYJAN. 17, 2016

• It was vulgarity and not elegance that ruled the day in Italy when Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi was simultaneously running the country and staging “bunga bunga” bacchanals. Mr. Berlusconi was hell on traditional Italian cultural values, his years in office a prolonged populist takedown of the high-minded intellectual and aesthetic achievements that defined Italian architecture, art, industrial design and, not least, its fashion for much of the 20th century.
  
  If all you ever knew of the country derived from the clownish antics of its prime minister or cultural slag like the Canale 5 television show “Uomini e Donne” — featuring hypertrophied himbos and Sunkist-colored bimbos competing to snare them — it would be hard to believe that La Dolce Vita had ever existed. And wasn’t that, after all, the premise upon which the 2013 film “La Grande Bellezza” spun out its Fellini-Lite lament for a bygone world?
  
  The world-weary tone adopted by Jep Gambardella, the Academy Award-winning movie’s protagonist — who drifts in his pastel linen suits through a social Rome altered almost beyond his recognition — struck a chord with Italian audiences. Five centuries after the Renaissance, had it come to this: pineapple pizza and coked-out raves?
  
  “We had to kill our masters at some point,” Carlo Borromeo, a Milanese industrial designer, said recently, referring to Italy’s unparalleled aesthetic legacy. “We had this huge inheritance from the past, and then somewhere along the way we had to get rid of it.”
  
  Yet, as it happens, what the Italian style journalist Angelo Flaccavento recently termed the “slow poisoning of the past” was not an irreversible process. Sure, a generation that came of age in the Berlusconi era might have gotten stuck wearing pointy shoes and whiskered jeans. Just as American men born under the shadow of casual Friday suddenly discovered the wonders of pick-stitching and cap-toed Oxfords, so have increasing numbers of Italian men gone in search of their nation’s rich sartorial legacy.
  
  
  
  
  
  Mr. Borromeo at home. CreditAlessandro Grassani for The New York Times
  “The kids, for instance, are superelegant,” said Mr. Borromeo, who is in his 30s. “They’re discovering the old codes, adapting and twisting them their own way.”
  
  To the surprise of Mr. Flaccavento, who curated an exhibition last summer at the Museo Marino Marini in Florence dedicated to the personal wardrobe of Nino Cerruti — the 85-year-old men’s wear designer who epitomizes Italian male elegance — the biggest response came from the young.
  
  “It was this huge reaction,” he said recently by phone from Milan. “Everybody was touched by how contemporary and elegant Mr. Cerruti’s looks were, how fresh and unpeacock-y.”
  
  With its emphasis on sleek lines and subdued colors, and on the countless refinements made possible by a profound tailoring legacy, Mr. Cerruti’s style is light years away from the cartoon dressing of the peacocks who have dominated the scene over the last several years at Pitti Uomo, the twice-yearly men’s wear show that draws as many as 1,200 exhibitors and 30,000 buyers to Florence.
  
  “Peacock” may not even be the correct term for the Instagram bait seen strutting around Florence in deerstalker caps or D’Annunzio chin whiskers or derbies or opera capes. Let’s say loons.
  
  “Pitti turned into a circus completely,” Mr. Flaccavento said. “It’s sad but true.”
  
  Raffaello Napoleone, director of Pitti Imagine, the parent organization of the Florentine trade fairs, said: “For quite a long time, things became quite ugly” — referring to the Berlusconi years. “Gradually, that is correcting itself.”
  
  
  
  
  Gianmaurizio Fercioni in the Brera area, where his tattoo studio and his home, at right, are located.CreditAlessandro Grassani for The New York Times
  Increasingly, a different style avatar has been spotted at Pitti and around the European capitals of fashion, a man who looks to be the inheritor of another variant of Italian taste. Think of him as a man in a supplely tailored suit like those created by the Neapolitan tailors of the 1920s, whose Anglophile clients sent them on espionage trips to Savile Row.
  
  Think of him as that guy on a Milanese street whose softly burnished lace-ups bespeak a level of careful maintenance that has nothing to do with turning up in some shutterbug’s social media feed. Think of him as a man like Mr. Borromeo, who eschews coats in favor of jackets or puffer vests and ties in favor of scarves, and who has what would seem to be a uniquely Italian ability to sport trousers in colors it used to be thought only Gianni Agnelli, the Fiat heir and storied playboy, could wear.
  
  Agnelli’s is a useful name in this context, since his is the image reflexively conjured up when the subject of great Italian clotheshorses come up. Yet, like his mediagenic grandson Lapo Elkann, who famously inherited and still wears things from his grandfather’s wardrobe, Agnelli was as much a creation of the modern publicity machine as Instagram regulars like Nick Wooster would become.
  
  And the style gestures for which Agnelli became best known — Tod’s boots left unlaced, wristwatch worn atop a shirt cuff, necktie left flapping outside a pullover — were a bit too considered to be truly elegant, after all.
  
  If elegance is refusal, as the famous formulation has it, there is everything to be said for a group of men that includes the designer Stefano Pilati, who since joining Ermenegildo Zegna in 2013 has delved deep into the milling traditions of that label and the sartorial history of his native land with each successive season; or coolly casual dressers like Mr. Borromeo, the industrial designer; or Gianmaurizio Fercioni, a renowned Milanese tattoo artist whose lavish inking sets off a sober style inspired by “the Duke of Kent, the Duke of Windsor and Coco Chanel”; or people like Mr. Flaccavento, who learned to dress, he said, through close observation of men of his grandfather’s generation in a small Sicilian town.
  
  “Italian elegance,” said Antonio Rummo, the scion of a pasta dynasty, is “defined by an ability to mix small gestures, wear clothes that are simple and not loud and that show respect for materials, texture and cut.”
  
  
  
  Guglielmo Miani, chief executive of the tailoring company Larusmiani, at the Camparino bar in Milan.CreditAlessandro Grassani for The New York Times
  That ability, according to Bonnie Clearwater, the director and chief curator of NSU Art Museum Fort Lauderdale, Fla., most likely shares its foundations with those of most other Western aesthetic achievements of the last five centuries: the Italian Renaissance.
  
  
  “In Italy, they put the body at the center of all design; it’s humanism, and in humanism the human figure is always the key,” said Ms. Clearwater. Next month an exhibit called “Bellissima: Italy and High Fashion 1945-1968” will open at the museum, curated by Maria Luisa Frisa, Anna Mattirolo, and Stefano Tonchi.
  
  The designer Brunello Cucinelli wrote in a recent email, “When I travel, I have to say, I keep perceiving a very strong love for the taste of my beautiful and esteemed Italy, which is experiencing a civil and economic revival.” He has also, he added, observed an unmistakable revival of traditional appetites for more refined forms of beauty happening at home.
  
  The example comes to mind of Guglielmo Miani, the chief executive of Larusmiani, a tailoring and textile company founded in the 1920s by his grandfather. “As with anything else, looking excessive or like you’ve gone to too much effort is generally a mistake,” said Mr. Miani, who is among the more impeccably attired gentleman you are likely to encounter.
  
  While he rotates through 15 suits and a similar number of blazers each season, choosing from 10 pairs of shoes and a handful of custom shirts from his own label, getting dressed in the morning takes him no more than 10 minutes, Mr. Miani said.
  
  And that is how it should be.
  
  “Combining the things you like and not thinking too much about it” is the philosophy he follows, Mr. Miani said. “The key is to know the rules and the elements and then just forget them.”
  
  Correction: January 21, 2016
  An earlier version of this article misstated Bonnie Clearwater’s association with “Bellissima: Italy and High Fashion 1945-1968,” which opens at the NSU Art Museum next month. Although she is the chief curator of the museum, she is not the curator of this specific exhibit.