From the January 2014 issue
Alessandro Sartori, the artistic director of Berluti, on broken suits, the brand's new store, and an easy way to make anything look a little cooler
Sartori
We sell most of our suits separately—you can buy the trousers of one suit and combine them with the jacket of another. I love broken suits, mixing textures and tones.
Think of your closet as a portfolio of products—you have a whole world in there, and whenever you buy something new, it has to work in your world. No one else's world. Yours.
Style your suit through color, with Yves Klein blue and aubergine and chocolate, shades that look and feel new. Style through cloth, like the linen-and-cotton suit [above left] that's as soft as cashmere. Style through construction: sharpness in the silhouette, lightness in the garment. Sharp and straight and masculine and strong, but light, always light.
A double-breasted suit is a formal suit, and it doesn't have to look formal. This one [above right] is chocolate. It's made from washed mohair. The jacket is completely deconstructed and has a Neapolitan shirt shoulder, and the shorter pants show off the shoe and show that you're not taking things so seriously.
An open shirt, with a silk scarf, makes anything look cool.
Elegance is having the knowledge to make the right combinations.
Take the trousers from a sunflower-yellow suit and pair them with something unexpected. This denim workwear jacket [left] has been bleached (indigo to white) and then dyed (white to aubergine), so we get the thickness and the irregularity of denim but in a unique color.
I've been doing a lot of research on French workers from the 1940s and '50s, people working in the fields and factories, and they wore these beautiful clothes with tons of hidden utilitarian details and functions. In this jacket, where you usually find the pockets you see the stitched outlines of hidden interior pockets.
The combinations of textures, of layers, is what makes things interesting. The shirt can be cotton and matte; the suit can be mohair and wool, with a midshine; and the tie or scarf can be shiny.
With our store in New York, we wanted to create a temple, a treasure box, for our bespoke service—we offer the full wardrobe, all 25 pieces, completely bespoke, along with our ready-to-wear collection and shoes. My customer needs to have a lot of options.
Top left: Three-button linen-and-cotton jacket ($3,300), cotton-and-silk shirt ($625), linen-and-cotton trousers ($1,250), and leather shoes. Top right: Double-breasted mohair-and-wool jacket ($3,315), cotton-and-silk shirt ($625), mohair-and-wool trousers ($1,050), leather shoes, and cotton-and-silk scarf ($290). Above left: Two-button cotton jacket ($3,050), silk-and-cashmere shirt ($1,100), cotton-and-polyester trousers ($1,350), leather shoes, and cotton scarf ($285). All by Berluti.
