Stefano Pilati offers a stitch in time to fast fashion

Fashion designers often don’t practice what they preach; they send insane (occasionally inane) outfits down the runway, while they themselves are dressed in basic black. For many, Uniqlo is their uniform. There are, of course, notable exceptions — the 58-year-old Italian designer Stefano Pilati being one of them.

He is gregarious, charming, handsome and impossibly well-dressed in a way that makes many people — including myself — chartreuse with envy, in the manner he casually wears, say, a Chanel jacket mixed with pieces from his lauded tenures at Saint Laurent (2004-12), Zegna and its womenswear branch Agnona (2013-15), and his own label Random Identities. The latter, launched in 2017, was rebooted this month under a new CEO and business partner, fashion retail veteran Mario Grauso, formerly president of Puig, Vera Wang group and Canadian department store Holt Refrew.

It was Pilati’s distinctive and much-photographed personal style that inspired Zara — the flagship brand of Inditex, which is considered the biggest fashion retailer in the world by revenue — to approach him to create a capsule of menswear looks, based on his wardrobe. It launches in-store on October 3. “Marta called me and asked me to do menswear for her,” Pilati recalls, via Zoom from Berlin where he lives with his partner Christian Schoonis.

He’s name-dropping Marta Ortega, chair of Inditex as of December 2021 and a personal friend. “She said, ‘We want you, exactly you, what you wear, how you are.’” So, Pilati based the collection both around what he wears, and what he wants to wear. “I was like, ‘Okay. So, I’m into long silhouette jackets, I’m into these pant shapes, let me do the denim like this. Maybe this is for the rain.’ Literally a wardrobe, to add to mine.” After he finished, Zara asked to add womenswear to the mix. Then came an advertising campaign, photographed by Steven Meisel and starring Pilati himself alongside übermodel Gisele Bündchen.

Those boldface talents give an idea of Pilati’s influence and standing, even if, perhaps, his name isn’t as starry as others. That’s because, despite working in the industry for over 30 years, he has never designed under it. You know the names of the companies he’s worked for: born and raised in Milan, he cut his teeth as an intern at Nino Cerruti, then Giorgio Armani — a designer who he still ardently admires, alongside Miuccia Prada with whom he also worked in the late 1990s. He then moved to assist Tom Ford at Yves Saint Laurent in Paris and, in 2004, was called on to take over the helm when the Gucci group was sold to PPR (now Kering) and Ford bowed out. In 2011, under Pilati, the Yves Saint Laurent label turned its first significant profit in a decade, about $15mn. During his eight-year creative directorship the brand created a spindly-heeled, platform-soled shoe known as the Tribute that is still sold today.

If not evident, I confess I am an ardent and long-term Pilati fan. I bought his clothes in “real-time” for Yves Saint Laurent and Zegna, and continue to hunt for them second-hand today. I’ve also purchased items Pilati wears, such as that aforementioned Chanel jacket, a coral-coloured bouclé tweed biker. “Doesn’t it make you feel like the coolest on the planet?” he asked. Alas, it makes me feel and look like Nancy Reagan gone rogue, which is perhaps a measure of the inestimable quality of personal style.

That said, Pilati’s Zara collection seems to have his own cool factor in the pieces. Men’s tailoring is languid, trousers lean and slouchy. His womenswear consciously echoes pieces from his YSL years; he’s recently been posting highlights on his personal Instagram. “I’m going through the archive and it’s also revisiting what you’ve done with a completely different eye now,” he says. “Obviously older, more mature or anyway different, yet very me.”

That exercise also, cleverly, serves to remind his fans of Pilati clothes they wish they’d bought back then. There’s a sleeveless blazer-dress, billowing chiffon halter-necked dresses, printed satin pyjamas, a faux fur chubby coat. Some outfits slip between the men’s and women’s, like a louche tuxedo suit in a sage green crepe. Fabrics include pure wools, silk, leather and cotton, and prices range from £12.99 up to £469.

The reflections of his past tenures in his Zara collection — particularly his Yves Saint Laurent — was natural. There was always plenty of Pilati chez YSL, despite the “heavy” (his word) legacy of the label: that fluid tailoring, the puddling wide-leg trousers. “Menswear didn’t really exist at Saint Laurent, so somehow I had to bring it myself personally,” says Pilati. “Womenswear was different. I worked to the point that I made it almost like a joy to project my femininity in my womenswear collections.”

His own label, Random Identities, eschews divides between men’s and womenswear. The designer has a tattoo across his forehead that reads “Freedom of Behaviour”, which reflects the label’s philosophy of clothes liberated from restriction. Mostly tailored clothes in black, its focus on silhouettes reflects obsessions of his work — he is an architect of fashion, not a decorator. Pilati, indeed, is the kind of talent often cited as a “designer’s designer”; he is friends with figures such as Phoebe Philo, and Kim Jones of Dior and Fendi, who last year invited Pilati to design a collaborative capsule for the latter label.

Despite that — and also a collaboration with footwear brand Birkenstock — the Zara collection is the first time Pilati has used his own name on a collection he has designed. It indicates that the designer has no hint of snobbishness around shifting from storied heritage brands to the mass-appeal of Zara.

For him, Zara is powerful. “I don’t know if you remember 2007, 2008, is when Zara started really booming,” Pilati says. “And somehow, if you were not part of the macro trend that they were producing or they were proposing, the CEOs, they saw it almost like a negative thing.” And, indeed, certain pieces Pilati produced — those platform shoes, wide cinching belts and the dancing shapes of his tulip skirts and banana-shaped trousers — became global trends. The striking thing? Pilati’s clothes from two decades ago still feel relevant — hence their echoes in this Zara drop. It’s an idea which makes him smile.

That is also a riposte to people who may see a high-street collaboration — any high-street collaboration — as simply supplying more low-price and highly-disposable “fast fashion” to consumers. That, however, runs anathema to how Pilati envisages this collaboration, in both the quality of pieces and their design integrity. “You might like them now, wear them, put them in your closet and then wear them again,” Pilati says. “You have to keep in mind that your clothes need to be timeless, not consumed and thrown away.” It should also be noted that these clothes will remain somewhat elusive; the collaboration will go into just 67 key stores, across Zara’s retail network of over 1,700 globally.

“I still love my job,” Pilati states. “I love the challenge also of being relevant, not for the glory. Relevant to me is — what are people looking for, that they don’t know that it exists?”

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