Even before news broke that Stefano Pilati was designing a capsule collection for Zara, those close to the Italian-born, Berlin-based designer knew something was about to happen. On Instagram, Pilati has been on a comeback tour of sorts, posting photos of past fashion shows, red carpet moments, and ad campaigns from his time at YSL (where he served as creative director from 2004 to 2012), as well as his own thoughts on creation memories.
Now that day has come: the unveiling of a collection of men’s and women’s clothing and accessories, shot by Steven Meisel and starring Gisele Bündchen and Pilati herself.
Pirati has known Marta Ortega Pérez, the president of Zara’s parent company Inditex, for 10 years and said they had often talked about working together in the past. When the offer finally came in January, Pilati was up for it. “I said, ‘Let’s do it.’ For me, it sounded very simple and fun, and it was also a different design perspective from what I was doing at Random.
Random Identities is a gender-fluid label that Pilati launched in 2017, four years after Zegna designed it. In fact, Ortega Perez’s original goal was to create a menswear line for Zara. It was a tribute to Pilati’s passion for clothing, which he had always admired. In 2016, the website ranked him at the top of its list of the fashion industry’s most stylish men. “For me,” Sally Singer wrote at the time, “Stefano Pilati is the epitome of fearless, effortless elegance: always very masculine, but those cuts, those clothes, the tattoos and the jewelry.
The scope of the project soon expanded to women’s clothing. “A lot of women have liked my clothes over the years,” Pilati said. “I think it’s because I care. Maybe men think it’s pretentious and women think it’s a more familiar thing, I don’t know.”
It’s certainly women who are buying Pilati’s new Zara men’s clothes, because they fit her ethos, particularly the trousers with exaggerated breaks, but conversely, it’s also possible that men are buying the women’s trousers. Pilati was very excited about a pair of ultra-low-cut leather pants. “I don’t design them for men, but I would wear them in a heartbeat.”
Elsewhere in the collection, Pilati designed a tailored black off-the-shoulder minidress at Saint Laurent that references Mr. Saint Laurent’s designs from his 1940s collection. “It’s part of my language, it’s what I do at Saint Laurent. It’s always been with me, rather than me being stuck in it; it’s part of me now.” The strawberry-embroidered train is a reference to another memory from his past. “I did a collection about strawberries, but on the men’s clothes, for example, I embroidered little bananas,” he laughs. “Is it just me?”
Who Pilati is continues to evolve. Earlier this month, he announced the addition of a business partner to enhance features like random recognition. “Working at Zara, I felt like maybe I was missing out on something better than what I was doing at Random,” Pilati said. “Random was economical in terms of creativity – it was a coat, dark dresses, a boom, shoulder bags. It made me realize how much I love collecting.”
