Zegna opens an oasis with stellar show inside Dubai Opera
Zegna staged its first-ever runway show outside of Italy on Wednesday, and its choice of Dubai said a huge amount about the ambitions of the brand – and of fashion - for the future.
Presented inside the Dubai Opera, the collection was the latest expression of subtle and subversive chic by the house's creative director Alessandro Sartori. Staged on a sandy twisting runway beneath palms and local trees and foliage, in the bowls of the Opera, a shiny steel structure built between the world's tallest building, the Burj El Khalifa, and Dubai Mall, where Zegna have their largest flagship in the world.
Other brands may be obsessed with growing their e-commerce business, but Zegna is very much into expanding its retail footprint in the region. With four stores already in Dubai, and a half-dozen opening in the next year in Saudi and other Gulf states.
Most of the audience – that included 150 VICs and Zegna ambassador Mads Mikkelsen – were dressed in head-to-toe Zegna. We counted over 100 pairs of Zegna's iconic Triple X sneakers in the front row.
Few designers have redefined the male post pandemic wardrobe more than Sartori, whose blend of sustainable and recycled fabrics, racy deconstruction and forgiving silhouettes have made him one of the most influential menswear designers in fashion today.
Zegna was once the purveyor of the defining high-end suit for young executives and thrusting decision makers. It still dresses them today, but with a far more perceptive, understated and insouciant style.
For more fun moments, Sartori opened with a series of pajama suits in one-inch-wide vertical stripes in light silk voile. Made with the very same fabric as interior lining, the silk scrunched slightly around the torso with raffish panache.
Ale, as all his pals call him, also experimented with paper thread, combining with leather to invent remarkable suede knit cardigans and jerkins. True menswear couture.
Other brilliant new fabrics included a tweed silk, with an uncanny hand from its irregular yarn, used in a great check suit; and a series of cool surgeons smocks in jacquard linen/wool, sanded hemp or second skin suede.
Over half the collection featured leather. Detailing included leather buttons, suede pocket trim, reverse leather jacket collars, cardigan crocodile piping. Whole looks included second-skin suede dusters or perforated leather gilets, to hyper malleable moccasins. Built in what Italians called Panama construction where they can almost be rolled up like socks.
'It's about developing hybrid fabrics to build uncomplicated clothes in terms of attitude. Layering, matching different components and collecting to create your very own wardrobe,' explained Sartori, in a pre-show preview.
His color palette ranged from Bordeaux and burgundy, to rope, cognac, liquorice or spicy checks. From desert hues to a series of greens that riffed on the verdant hills of Piedmont, where founder Ermenegildo first dreamed of an Oasi Zegna. Back in 1910, he literally bought a mountain side, 30 times the size of Central Park or 12 as large as the Bois de Boulogne, where the brand would eventually plant over 500,000 trees.
Referenced in a series that included a must-have acid green four-pocket tailored jacket. Or the latest versions – in linen, tech-y silk, denim or crocodile – of the Conte jacket, the signature garment of Ermenegildo, a blazer cut with high Nehru collar.
Post-show, guests could stroll into Villa Zegna, an elegant installation and storytelling of the brand's origins and DNA inside the opera house, that included Ermenegildo's desk, reading glasses, carved leather chair and silk trimmed Homburg hat.
The third iteration of Villa Zegna – following Shanghai and New York – this unique gentleman's pop-up club lasts one week in Dubai. Containing a rich selection of Zegna fashion, where a select few VICs can order, or have made bespoke from scratch, the entire wardrobe. Including another outstanding Conte jacket made in soft violet crocodile.
Guests could also experience Zegna's latest cologne, also named Il Conte. Inspired by a visit to Zegna's key plant in Trivero, in the Piedmontese foothills of the Alps. It mixes the factory's smell of wet wool with Tahitian vanilla, leather, patchouli and benzoin resin. Produced in a limited-edition of just 300 flacons made of hand-blown Murano glass finished with a wooden cap and family crest. Like the collection, a savvy display of the Italian art de vivre, lifestyle and special sense of tradition.
Though the focus this Wednesday was on the catwalk show, which opened with a special composition by James Blake, playing solo on a grand piano, before segueing into a soundtrack of lush orchestration - a blend of Polish composer Abel Korzeniowski's soundtrack from "Dance for Me Wallis" and Max Richter's "On the Nature of Daylight."
All told, the latest smart fashion statement by Sartori, one of fashion's most successful commercial designers, as well as a pathbreaking talent.
During a tricky moment for high fashion, the Ermenegildo Zegna Group – which also includes Tom Ford and Thom Browne – scored profits of €184 million, and earned on a 2% rise in revenues to €1.945 billion in 2025, where Zegna accounts for 69% of revenues, and 85% of profits.
In a word, the most successful brand pivot in menswear today in the past half-decade. All unveiled in Zegna's latest oasis – or Oasi.
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