Norbert Stumpfl held Brioni’s first-ever exclusively womenswear presentation at the 1945-founded house’s Milan showroom, just one door down from that of its Kering cousin Balenciaga. Unlike traditional Italo-luxe heritage peers such as Loro Piana or Zegna, Brioni’s origins are rooted in tailoring and construction rather than fabrics and materials. And unlike its raucously rebellious Parisian neighbor, Brioni’s philosophy has remained intrinsically Roman: let the classics endure as the times change around them.
As Stumpfl explained, this compact standalone womenswear collection is not a question, but an answer. He said: “Demand has been growing and growing to the point that it seemed right to meet it. The collection comes from the same place as the menswear, with the same ideas, colors, materials. Although we have introduced some new shapes.” Like the menswear, this collection is handmade in the house’s wonderful Penne tailoring facility, which sits alongside its venerable and impressive school dedicated to bringing fresh generations to the craft. Like the same-season menswear collection, this was informed by the house’s interesting origin connection with Mariano Fortuny. Unlike that collection, however, Stumpfl and his team chose to emphasize Brioni’s foundation in tailoring rather than any satellite informality.
Look four was a for-women example of Brioni’s pinnacle of expertise in crafting unstructured tailored garments from handmade layers of the thinnest, finest fabrics. “Honestly, this shouldn’t exist! It’s crazy the amount of skill and precision that it takes to make it.” The result was an ensemble whose facade appeared substantial and authoritative yet whose reality is almost shockingly intangible to the touch. There were beautiful capes, coats, and trenches in cashmere, vicuna, silk gabardine, and all the usual luxe-suspects. A blazer-buttoned cropped and fitted field jacket in Prince of Wales silk-wool check and a gently striped darkest-blue three-piece suit in softly durable super 160s wool were both cut with subtle yet evident consideration for the female forms they were conceived to clothe.
A box bag clad in 25 carat gold accessorized a house-cut double breasted notch tuxedo jacket—with extra darting at the waist—and white intarsia pants to create an intensely refined quintessential evening ensemble. My two cents on this extremely rich (in both senses) and elevated niche Brioni womenswear initiative is that it could be presented more dynamically, without going full runway. Seeing these clothes move—or even better trying them on and giving them a spin—would much more effectively translate their specialness than leaving them hanging unlived-in on rails and mannequins.
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