Zegna x The Elder Statesman launches with Los Angeles pop-up in a Jean Prouvé-designed structure

The arrival of the highly anticipated Zegna x The Elder Statesman collaboration –between the luxury fashion brand and the Los Angeles-based knitwear label – is being feted with a temporary installation at the iconic Maxfield boutique on Melrose in Los Angeles. Housed within one of Jean Prouvé’s ‘Nomade’ structures from 1957, which Maxfield owner Tommy Perse collected and installed in the retail destination’s parking lot, the pop-up has been exquisitely designed to celebrate a shared vision of craftsmanship, design and sustainable values that transcends geography. 

First premiered during Paris Fashion Week A/W 2023 last February, the vibrant collection is the beginning of an ongoing dialogue around Oasi Cashmere, a pioneering platform that proves Zegna’s commitment to establishing a fully traceable cashmere supply chain by 2024. Zegna’s collaboration with The Elder Statesman is a testament to the mutual respect and admiration for craft shared between both brands. Together, Zegna artistic director Alessandro Sartori and The Elder Statesman’s founder Greg Chait have rightly put the focus on material excellence, the expertise of master craftspeople, and a respect for nature. This not only starts from the clothes themselves, which showcase a fresh aesthetic that brings together Zegna’s classic masculinity and The Elder Statesman's signature infusion of craft and levity, but extends to the technical fabrication of how the pieces are made. 

Zegna x The Elder Statesman launches in Los Angeles

‘Greg was very technical and into [the idea of] making and craft, starting from the yarns. It was a good surprise, and it’s very rare to find someone that speaks about these, because it literally [comes] before creativity. [The yarns are] the genesis of creativity,’ says Sartori, ahead of the installation’s unveiling.

This innate respect for materials and the raw building blocks of creating fashion was something the two instantly bonded over. ‘To me, these are the most important. You can’t have fashion without the materials. If one doesn’t exist, you can’t have it,’ says Chait. ‘When I was first starting out – I was actually just trying to make a blanket – I was super lucky that my first foray into things was from the fibre yarn, and building a yarn by hand. They are really the building blocks.’

‘Inside Zegna, it’s very common because we are grounded in craft, but in the industry it’s not that common,’ says Sartori. ‘We usually discuss the stitch, yarn and fabric and starting from that, let’s go. In contrast here, we started with the fibre and we took that part of the journey that goes from the fibre to the yarn. I was fascinated by Greg because he was asking me about that process, which is very unusual.’

He continues, ‘We shared values from day one. We shared the vision of very high quality, long-lasting products, of things that are here to stay. Oasi Cashmere is a platform for collections. We wanted to have a totally traceable product from the source, so if you source the water, you know where the first drop is. We know the farmers, how many animals they care for, how much cashmere they can produce, the type of raw quality they produce, the area of Mongolia where they are. They know that we treat them well and we have secured and locked the quantities. We buy all that they do. We don’t blend the cashmere with any other cashmere. And once it's selected and collected there, we lock it and send it to Italy. We wash it internally, we do all the processes internally. And the yarn that we put together is according to the final product that we want to create, from a beanie to a cardigan.’

Suffice to say that there is an exquisite quality to the cashmere used in the collection. Highly technical and designed to last, each piece is an explosion of colour and texture, be it a brushed cashmere and wool robe cardigan in black and white checks, or a multi-coloured stripe cashmere and wool puffer coat that is fully made from cashmere and wool.

Following the launch in Los Angeles, the collection will be celebrated in Chengdu and Singapore this month. The pop-up at Maxfield will be ongoing until 23 September 2023 with exclusive colourways of the range’s off-kilter patterns available.

www.zegna.com
www.theelderstatesman.com
www.oasizegna.com