Brunello Cucinelli's 'Icon' Status Was Just Made Official
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Conversations with Brunello Cucinelli rarely begin with clothing. He may be the owner of a 45-year-old eponymous luxury label, but the man himself is more apt to delve into weighty matters like philosophy, life, and death than he is to start talking about cashmere or tailoring, even though those are two core elements of his brand. So, when he and I joined a Zoom together one March morning to discuss a new collection and a recent award, we first found ourselves on the subject of spring—and Cucinelli’s late father.
“Everything is blooming, blossoming,” he said through an interpreter. “Today is March the 13th. And on March the 15th, the swallows will come here. That happens every year.” They nest, he explained, on the walls of the castle in Solomeo, the small, central-Italian village he rebuilt as the headquarters of his brand. “In 2020, during the pandemic, in the early morning of March the 15th, I saw them fly in. And then I said to my dad, who by the way passed away just last year after he had reached a hundred years of age, ‘Dad, who sends the swallows every single year? Who sends springtime every year?’ And he just raised his gaze to the heavens and said, ‘Well, you see, spring comes.’”
See? Not a single mention of cashmere. But that’s the thing about Cucinelli: Despite making some of the most exceptional clothes on the market for a customer base comprised of fashion obsessives and tech billionaires alike, he’s more of a “life” guy than a “clothes” guy. It just so happens that for him, a good life is lived in clothes as special as a moment like watching the swallows fly in to nest on your castle while your father is at your side. And anyway, the 69-year-old designer was feeling a little wistful, having just ten days earlier, in Paris, been presented with the Neiman Marcus Award for Distinguished Service in the Field of Fashion.
“I've had the great benefit of being acquainted with Mr. Cucinelli for the better part of 20 years, as a journalist and now as a retailer,” explained Bruce Pask, who worked as an editor at T: The New York Times Style Magazine, GQ, and Cargo before joining on with Neiman Marcus and its sibling company Bergdorf Goodman as men’s fashion director. “What I think is so interesting is that he, as a designer and as a brand, really stands for all the greatness of Italy—the history, the clothing, the craft, the food, the wine, the beauty. I think the brand really encapsulates all of that in this wonderful, lifestyle-driven collection that started with making beautiful knitwear with some of the finest fibers in the world.”
Hence the award, of course. But there’s more to it than that. To mark the occasion, Cucinelli, Pask, and their respective teams joined forces to create the Icon Collection exclusively for Neiman Marcus. “It's such a perfect distillation of the brand,” said Pask, “right down to the color palette. It's these wonderful, pale, beautiful colors that I think we all generally associate with Mr. Cucinelli. I just think he has really created something super special.”
The idea, Pask explained, was to focus on the elements of Cucinelli’s collection that transcend time and place—to really lean into the “icon” of it all. Functionally, that translates to soft tailoring in shades of beige, wool-cashmere sweaters and pleated trousers in stony gray, and a suede bomber and baseball cap in a creamy off-white—the kind of clothes that look perfectly at-home right now but would look equally excellent ten years into the past or future.
“When you're investing in beautifully crafted, wonderfully made garments, they last and they grow with us and they age with us,” Pask said. “They become those iconic timeless pieces that we reach for again and again. I think this is so synonymous with a Brunello Cucinelli collection. There's a reason why there's a consistency in his collection from season to season: because we like that comfort, that calm, and the style that is inherently timeless.”
Cucinelli, for his part, said he was inspired by effortless American style in his quest to blend the tastes of the Cucinelli and Neiman Marcus customer in the new collection. He was also particularly pleased that his own vision and that of the general menswear consumer are dovetailing so nicely at the moment. “I feel that fashion is now veering towards a taste that is definitely more elegant, chic, refined,” he said. “Well-dressed, in a word.”
The collection just hit Neiman Marcus stores, and for fashion fans, the pieces up for sale are all but guaranteed to become catnip for collectors. And that’s not all. Cucinelli also teased an upcoming iteration of the Icon Collection, informed explicitly by the West Coast—“a tribute to Hollywood; the chic elegant America.” But before that rolls out—before the current iteration of the Icon Collection even landed on shelves—Cucinelli was back in central Italy, taking stock of everything this moment entails.
“I would've never thought to be presented with such a prestigious award like the one that was given to me recently,” he said. Before he left for Paris to accept it, he returned to the tiny hamlet where he was born. “I went to the cemetery with the gravestone of my uncles and my grandparents. I said to them, ‘Tomorrow, I’m going to Paris and there my great friends, the Americans, are going to bestow upon me a very great prize. So please help me this occasion because when I'm back, I'm going to come and show you the prize.’”
The Saturday before we spoke, Cucinelli did just that, brandishing his prize in the cemetery for his departed family. “I think that if someone had shot a video of me doing that, they would've thought that I had gone crazy,” he laughed.
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