“Where can we help her to make her life easier, to make her life lighter, and to not wear her down?” Norbert Stumpfl puts the caring into Kering in his approach to womenswear at Brioni. This approach is one of the attributes that makes this smallest of the French group’s maisons—a Lamborghini to Gucci’s Audi—so distinct.
Based on client feedback and designer instinct, seasonal tweaks to the offer’s wearable aerodynamics saw Strumpfl introduce the strong-shouldered drapily-skirted Virgilio jacket in a matching shantung set blends of shirt, ties, and (wide) pants. A chicly utilitarian safari set in water-repellent silk (that really looked like cotton drill) with a leather-backed collar was one of several looks cinched by a wide military style veg-tanned leather belt: “it will become much more beautiful with age and wear,” observed Stumpfl. A trench jacket in heavy cream silk crepe was fastened by buttons covered in the same material.
Super loose double-breasted jackets in silk linen were cut to just above the knee but vented at the side seam up to the waist. Worn with a boat neck shift top and wide leg pants they looked, even on a boucle-faced mannequin, both easy and elevated. A collarless caban in textured finish silk crepe—a sort of summer tweed substitute—was similarly slashed and worn above a front split (covered) buttoned skirt. Stumpfl stopped to explain in great detail the specifics of its hand-applied pocket finishing.
Convertible silk shirt dresses cut with folded skirts and straps to manage them offered the Brioni customer multiple wearabilities in one garment. We saw the long-skirted slit double-breasted jacket again, this time with a long split skirt, in the same mesmerizingly dye-touched seersucker that came up last June in menswear. Also echoing the menswear was an evening jacket whose body was hand stitched from 700 meters of black silk ribbon, an amazing thing. Women with the economic wherewithal to buy Brioni probably enjoy a pretty elevated quality of life. Yet you could see these garments make that life feel lighter still.