Marco De Vincenzo on Making Blankets His Thing, Imprinting His Vision on Etro’s Home Lines
MILAN — If it’s true that three coincidences serve as proof, then Marco De Vincenzo must be on to something with his fascination with blankets.
First he replicated the geometric motif of a blanket from his childhood on the roomy long coat that opened his first menswear show for Etro in January. A month later, he swirled a series of colorful, patterned blankets over models’ torsos in a charming styling touch that marked his sophomore women’s effort for the brand.
More from WWD
For his third debut at the company in less than a year, this time for Etro’s home category, the designer is once again relying on what has become a talisman for him — but he only realized the coincidence during a conversation with WWD ahead of Salone del Mobile, which opens here on Tuesday.
“The blanket is becoming a sort of obsession, indeed,” he said with a laugh, after teasing a special collaboration with painter Amy Lincoln to be unveiled on the eve of the design event.
The tie-up resulted in four limited-edition jacquard cashmere blankets that could double as “modern tapestries for their precious craftsmanship and chromatic impact” as they translated artworks that Lincoln created exclusively for Etro into textiles. The motifs depicted celebrate nature through images of leaves, trees, waves and clouds in shaded hues.
“I see blankets as objects to collect. I am full of them, purchased over the years, and I believe they are kind of symbolic of the intimate relationship between a person and how he lives….Plus I consider blankets the first element of interior I link to this brand. If I don’t think about a piece of clothing, Etro is a blanket for me,” De Vincenzo said.
Indeed, so far the designer has somehow looked at a domestic dimension in interpreting the label, often blurring the boundaries between ready-to-wear and home interiors. In putting the textile heritage of Etro at the core of his vision, De Vincenzo has relied on bold tapestry-like fabrications and rich textures, exalted by clean silhouettes and cocooning designs that ooze coziness, comfort and ease.
He is eager to further take the cross-pollination between these two worlds to the streets with his fetish item. Already building on this direction was his women’s show in February, when different blankets were left on every seat and by the next morning guests could be seen reinventing their outfits by winding them around their shoulders. “This should be rediscovered as an object and I will focus on this again, because its double use has disappeared a bit but for me a blanket can have a right place in the wardrobe, as well as on the sofa at home,” he said.
To be displayed via the “Woven Spectrum” immersive installation staged at the Etro Home boutique in the Brera district, the blankets developed with Lincoln will represent the more arty expression of Etro’s expansive home category. This includes objects and textiles under the Etro Home Collection banner and furniture under Etro Home Interiors, a business licensed to Oniro Group since 2017.
In approaching the home category for the first time — De Vincenzo said he’s only toyed with it privately until now, including building some tables and objects for his residence in Rome with the help of a craftsman — the designer wanted to continue the duality that is defining his creative journey at the company. On one hand he celebrates the heritage of the brand, which started as a textile firm in 1968, and on the other, he breaks its schemes with his own personal codes.
“There is a double matrix, one that draws on the mix-and-match of fabrics and textiles, with some jacquards with an old-school flavor, and one that represents that part of me that I’m trying to introduce into the history of Etro,” De Vincenzo said. “But even if it is part of the company, [the interiors category] has different rules,” he added.
“Clearly [Oniro] wanted the project to be consistent with what we’ve been doing at Etro for the past eight months now and so we’ve found many common [paths]. We have revolutionized everything a bit, starting from fabrics to the shapes of the furniture that we will present. It was indeed a work of restyling, even though it followed rules that I didn’t know, because the home category has its own demands and markets I wasn’t familiar with,” De Vincenzo said.
Asked about the biggest challenge throughout the process, the designer pointed to finding a compromise between both parties’ needs.
“While I’ve always made fashion without thinking about myself — because I’ve never actually used fashion to express myself and I dress very differently from what I design — when it comes to home [furnishing] I have a very personal point of view. So it was difficult to find a compromise, precisely because I realized that ironically I had never done it before when designing clothes. In this case I had to find a [link] between my taste, my homes, my environments, the spaces I like and where I would like to live in, and the ones where the brand’s customers and those already following the brand long before me live in,” noted De Vincenzo.
For the interiors range, the effort resulted in colorful geometric patterns and modular arrangements designed around palettes of greens, blues and natural earth tones, to be displayed in three set-ups at the Etro showroom in Via Spartaco.
“I like environments with fairly delicate nuances rather than colors too bright,” De Vincenzo said. Rugs will make for the strongest counterpoint, with their psychedelic motifs but “overall everything will be balanced, a bit like I’m doing on the ready to wear, where the mix of motifs almost creates almost a faux monochrome effect…because there are many things blended together but none has more power than the other.”
The collaboration with Lincoln will make for the moment of biggest disruption as De Vincenzo teased it will “represent the dreamlike part of my vision for the brand” and will evoke the mood of “Manifesto,” a series of portraits released ahead of Etro’s spring 2023 show in September to express the quest for freedom and individuality through color that De Vincenzo wants to pursue at the brand. The project was the first act of his “Etropìa” visual journey, which continued with the release of the first advertising campaign and a series of activations, as reported.
The designer noted that Lincoln’s work matches his passion for optical art and identified the American artist as part of a new wave of talents “that paint with the brush but [deliver a] result that almost seems to have a digital effect.”
“I love her color composition, so clean, hypnotic and almost naïve,” said De Vincenzo, teasing that these features were translated “spectacularly” into textile forms. “[Lincoln] hasn’t seen the result yet, but she will be surprised because she will see her work becoming something else,” he predicted.
The in-store event on Monday will also mark the first time the two talents will meet in person. De Vincenzo recalled that the collaboration was sparked by chance and, as for all the other artistic tie-ups he previously developed under his namesake fashion brand, Instagram played a key role in it. A couple of months before joining Etro last year, the designer scouted Lincoln on the social platform, was struck by the aesthetic affinity and contacted her “without knowing what we could have done together.” Once he joined the fashion house, he realized that Etro’s home category could propel the collaboration.
In addition to his fascination with blankets, De Vincenzo revealed that the first thing that catches his attention when stepping into a home are walls. “While chairs, tables and sofas are linked to a functional aspect, walls are canvases to decorate. And save for rare cases, a painting you hang on a wall is there because you like it there, not because it’s needed there. So you can understand a lot from the walls of a house, starting from the taste of the person who lives in it,” he said. “Plus, for those who love to collect objects like me, walls offer a moment of playfulness. They are never the starting point in decorating a home, but the most fun part.”
Best of WWD
