Elegance, Nino Cerruti once said, got on his nerves. It was the kind of comment you can afford to throw away when you’re easily the most elegant man in the room. And Mr. Cerruti, who died last month at age 91, embodied that quality, a quality rarely encountered, yet unmistakable when in his presence.
“It can be learned, but you have to have a natural aptitude for it,” he said in an interview in L’Officiel USA last year.
While sartorial elegance is an instinct, as Mr. Cerruti suggested, it can be anatomized. It comes from knowing and staying true to yourself; from relentlessly assessing physical flaws and assets to understanding the effect of your body moving through space. It depends to some extent on learning the basics of dressing before pitching them.
As we enter the third year of a pandemic, still generally at home in our casual duds, it may seem like an aptitude for elegance is just as useful as knowing how to prune a bonsai.
But as the recent menswear and couture shows in Europe suggested, there’s a stylish mirage hovering on the horizon. Designers, experts and consumers crave reasons to re-dress – routinely and in public. By this we don’t mean for Instagram selfies or red-letter events like, say, the Met Gala, which has come to resemble the fashion version of Comic Con.
On catwalks and showrooms in Milan and Paris, labels like Prada, Louis Vuitton and Tod’s represented individual visions of clothing that nodded obliquely to Mr. Cerruti, who insiders know laid the foundations for a post-war Italian clothing industry that gave Italian sartorial elegance a global identity. .
“I’m very attracted to that idea of chic,” said Walter Chiapponi, the creative director of Tod’s, in Milan last month after previewing a fine capsule collection of reworked classics that have come out of the closets of a certain kind of Italian from a certain pedigree. – someone like Nino Cerruti. “Those Northern Italians have always had this quality,” said Mr Chiapponi. “It’s a matter of culture.”
Reflexively, the banner for that form of chic has been Gianni Agnelli, the industrialist and Fiat heir. However, Mr. Agnelli was a showboat, partly a creation of a post-war gossip culture fascinated by the doings of a newly minted cosmopolitan jet set.
The contrast between the two men is also instructive. Where Mr Agnelli’s signatures (shoulder-buttoned sweaters, jeans, soft-soled car shoes, ties in waistbands, wristwatches worn on shirt cuffs) converged as expressions of sprezzatura, a common term for discarded elegance, Cerruti’s was more authentic and relaxed. He dressed so as not to be noticed. But when you were with him, you wondered why he looked so much better than anyone else.
“He was the most stylish man I’ve ever met,” said Emanuele Farneti, fashion and style editor-in-chief at the Italian daily La Repubblica. “He was a symbol of a certain kind of elegance that is specific to regions and generations, places like Milan and Turin. It’s a kind of chic that is the opposite of showing off.”
In a sense, said Mr. Farneti, it’s no surprise that Cerruti discovered “Armani,” who saw the older man as a relative unknown employed by La Rinascente department store and hired to design menswear for his Hitman label. Throughout his 50-year career, Giorgio Armani has rarely strayed from a quiet core aesthetic. When critics caricature the seeming monotony of his work, they also tend to forget his early innovations.
More than any other designer, Mr. Armani can be credited with popularizing deconstructed suits. And whether intentional or not, contemporary designers like Jerry Lorenzo of Fear of God or Mike Amiri of Amiri nod to his legacy with each new collection of their lofty streetwear. However, Mr. Armani did not ‘invent’ deconstruction. If anyone was, it was Nino Cerruti. “He was the forerunner,” said Nick Sullivan, Esquire’s creative director.
Mr. Cerruti, descendant of an industrial family whose wool mills Lanificio Cerruti were founded in 1881 in the northern town of Biella, was early on Mr. Cerruti to notice the potential of branching fabric production into clothing. “Together with Walter Albini, he pioneered what became Italian ready-to-wear,” Sullivan said. “He was a rock star in the late ’60s.”
One of the innovations Mr. Cerruti pioneered was suits that were stripped of their rigid interior structures. “He was one of the first to deconstruct the jacket,” says Angelo Flaccavento, an Italian style writer.
Unlike the shirt-soft Neapolitan tailoring that had been popular since the 1920s, when upper-class Englishmen sent their tailors to Naples to copy local techniques, Mr. Cerruti kept the structure in his suits while relaxing them at the same time. The simple decision to remove canvas, flannel, horsehair and other underpinnings from traditional suits ultimately influenced the course of modern menswear.
Mr. Cerruti was a pioneer in other ways. Early on with the concept of genderless fashion, which he called “couple’s dressing,” he also routinely dressed celebrities, including Anita Ekberg, Jean-Paul Belmondo, and Harrison Ford, not because his publicists had stalked them for lucrative recommendations. Many of his star customers, he said, “came into my shop in Paris as customers.”
Oddly enough, his cinematic contribution has generally received little recognition as he has outfitted countless films. “So many things that people think Armani was in movies was Cerruti,” noted designer Umit Benan over the phone from Milan last week.
While it was costume designer Marilyn Vance who picked out the wardrobe for “Pretty Woman,” it was her choice of Cerruti suit that made the millionaire John, played by Richard Gere, dignified and imparted an enduring elegance to an essentially generic character.
Cerruti designs appeared in films as diverse as “Wall Street” and “The Silence of the Lambs” and were worn by generations of fashionable men. Yet no one has ever managed to look as effortlessly stylish as the designer himself. There were his sorbet-colored sweaters draped (though not buttoned) over the shoulders. There were his quirky pea-green socks worn with gray flannel pants. There were his pinstripe shirts, which were always worn over a dark T-shirt and under a tweed jacket, without a tie. There were his Yohji Yamamoto sneakers and the sartorial tricks few but experts would discover.
“He was very aware of his body and frame and how to work with it,” said Mr. Flaccavento.
Tall and lanky Mr. Cerruti was tall in the torso and dressed in a way that minimized flaws in his figure. “In my mind’s eye I see him in a soft suit, usually gray, with an open-neck shirt and a contrasting dark T-shirt underneath,” says Peter Speliopoulos, former creative director of DKNY and one of the many talents (Véronique Nichanian of Hermès and Narciso Rodriguez were others) noticed early or hired by Mr. Cerruti.
“He tucked his pants up high, wore a worn leather belt to accentuate his height – or to create the illusion of very long legs,” Mr Speliopoulos said.
Until the end, he smoked like a devil and lit his cigarettes with matches, somehow even adding an element of chic to this custom. “He was devilishly stylish,” said Mr Flaccavento, who in 2015 organized an exhibition at the Museo Marino Marini in Florence of clothes from Mr Cerruti’s personal wardrobe – he rarely threw anything away – including suits, jackets, trousers, evening wear. and capes that trace the evolution of Italian menswear through six decades.
One of the more fascinating items featured on that show was a frayed wool coat that had been well-ventilated by moths. As humble as it was, there was elegance in the designer’s brash decision not just to keep an old piece of clothing, but to display it as representative of himself.
“I kept it for a simple reason,” Mr. Cerruti told this reporter at the time. “I’ve always liked that fabric.”