Ever since its foundation in 1872 by Eugenio Torelli Viollier—who would go on to launch Corriere della Sera a few years later—the Circolo Filologico Milanese has been dedicated to unravelling the most acute and nuanced cadences of language. This morning Norbert Stumpfl brought his Brioni, which is similarly committed to the minutiae of cultured menswear, to take up temporary residence in the space.
The mannequins were set up across the darkened library and several other rooms below. The producers dropped Easter egg nods to recent notable Brioni moments across the set-up—a pattern with the name J.Law was hung within easy eye-shot—but the really extraordinary detail was left to Stumpfl to reveal. “I found this in the archives—because you know I’m a book nerd: Gaetano Savini [Brioni’s founder] worked with Mariano Fortuny for ten years. He was Fortuny’s assistant and worked alongside him.” That detail was nuts. Fortuny was a polymath (what you’d call a high-achieving multi-hyphenate) who invented new lighting systems for the theater and was a celebrated couturier in womenswear, most particularly for his Delphos dress. Knowing Savini’s proximity to this suddenly made the color and romanticism of early Brioni collections (which became so influential in the US during the 1950s) make fresh and fascinating sense.
This research inspired Stumpfl to articulate that connection in order to restore it to the fabric of Brioni. There was a pleated evening shirt embroidered with a grosgrain design by Fortuny, shared with the permission of the designer’s foundation. An evening jacket was embedded with pearlescent sequins just as Fortuny once used Murano glass, and a closing silk jacket in bronze silk shared the tight narrow pleating—sort of pre-Miyake Miyake—that once made the Delphos gown so celebrated. There was also room for technical innovation achieved by artisanal means, including a double faced jacket of two super light fabrics attached by scalpel and silk. There was a full cast of crushingly handsome menswear that ran from the sartorial to the apparently casual.
There was also a small cluster of mannequins in womenswear, something that Stumpfl has been quietly developing for a while. As we considered his floor length tuxedo coats and wickedly cut silk wool pants, he dropped another surprise: for the first time since its foundation nearly 80 years ago, Brioni will show a full womenswear collection at Milan Fashion Week next month.
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