The Italian term ‘villeggiatura’, which loosely translates to ‘resting in pleasant places’, has come to encapsulate the Edenic bliss of an endless summer – a prolonged stay away from home, in the countryside or by the ocean, where settling in one place allows you to adopt the local rhythms of life. Originating in Renaissance Venice, when the wealthy would escape the sweltering city heat in summer to their countryside villas, it was popularised in the 1960s, when families would pack up their Fiat 500s and spend weeks on end travelling the Amalfi Coast or Italian Riviera.
It feels a particularly ripe inspiration for the Italian fashion house Zegna, which was founded as a wool mill in Trivero in the Biellese Alps, a bucolic locale which is now part of the Oasi Zegna national park. It is a house that thrives on the local: despite sourcing its fibres from far-off places – whether Mongolia for cashmere or Normandy, France for linen flax – fabrics are spun in Italian mills using traditional techniques. It is also a house synonymous with the idea of escape – particularly the languid elegance of its summer collections, constructed largely from Oasi Lino linen, designed for clients who spend long summers stationed in Portofino or Saint-Tropez.
Zegna heads to Los Angeles for its S/S 2027 show
(Image credit: Zegna)
Yesterday evening in Malibu, California – a beachside city for those who seek a more sedate way of life than its neighbouring Los Angeles – Zegna hosted its latest Spring/Summer offering, titling it ‘La Villeggiatura’ in ode to the Italian ritual. The setting was Malibu Pier, first constructed in 1905, which had been lined with striped parasols in a nod to the Italian seaside resorts of the 1960s and 1970s, while surfers bobbed about below in the waves (colourful cocktails, served on arrival, added to the buoyant mood). Among the 500 guests, several of whom were local clients, were Rami Malek, Mahershala Ali, Stellan Skarsgård and Gael García Bernal.
The collection itself was defined by the pursuit of effortlessness which has defined Alessandro Sartori’s tenure at the house so far (the Italian designer was appointed creative director in 2016). He described the silhouette for the season as ‘dégagé’: just-oversized tailoring, in seersucker or more vivid stripes, met roomier smock-style shirting with deep V-shaped necklines fastened across the chest with metal clasps. Cut from silk, leather or croc, and coming in short- and long-sleeve iterations, they met tailored shorts, safari-style parkas, and knit jackets recalling styles from the 1960s and 1970s. A vivid use of colour enlivened the collection’s closing act: a joyful section in vivid aqua, orange and green was Sartori’s boldest palette in some time.
(Image credit: Zegna)
‘In this collection, I wanted to express a Zegna take on summer, our vision of leisure dressing as something that’s drenched in a cultivated attitude, in a discerning gaze that’s profoundly Italian,’ he said. ‘Everything here starts from fabrics, which have texture and pattern, and look endlessly renewed by simply twisting and turning the subtlest elements, even just a thread. Constant evolution is what we strive for.’
The show was the second major European fashion show of the week, with Hermès showing a ‘Second Chapter’ of its A/W 2026 womenswear collection the evening before in Bel Air, while last month, Jonathan Anderson staged his first Cruise show for Dior at the Los Angeles County Museum of Art (LACMA). Part of this appears to be a bid to capture the American consumer (Gucci and Louis Vuitton also showed Cruise collections in New York in May), something Zegna will further capitalise on with the opening of the ephemeral Villa Zegna in Los Angeles’ Chateau Marmont. A private members’ club of sorts, it allows invited clients to purchase made-to-order pieces from the collection amid surroundings evocative of a 1970s Italian villa – a concept which follows previous iterations in Shanghai, New York, Dubai, Miami and Milan.
(Image credit: Zegna)
