From spezzato to Gucci: fabric, the body, and new masculine codes
The story of “soft” masculinity in Italian fashion does not begin with Alessandro Michele—and certainly not with Gucci in 2015. Its roots reach further back, to an earlier layer in which Romeo Gigli offered his own reading of the menswear suit through the principle of spezzato—a “broken” ensemble in which the jacket and trousers do not match in fabric.
Precision matters here: spezzato as a “broken suit” has long existed within Italian menswear; the style has been popular since at least the 1950s. With Gigli, the point is not the “invention” of spezzato, but how he rewrites an already recognizable tailoring code within his own aesthetic. In the source text, this shift is linked to the late 1990s, when his menswear was produced by Ermenegildo Zegna S.p.A. at a factory in Lugano.
By the end of the twentieth century, Gigli’s menswear—produced, among others, by Ermenegildo Zegna—demonstrated a fundamentally different approach to the body: velvet and wool did not “shape” the figure so much as accompany it, allowing clothing to function as a threshold between interior and exterior. The suit was not armor; it was a condition. In Jacques Derrida’s terms, a state of “betweenness.” At this point, Italian menswear was increasingly speaking not about the power of form, but about the experience of the body.
In the 1970s and 1980s, this shift was amplified by magazine and media culture—above all by L’Uomo Vogue (founded in 1967), which became a platform for rethinking masculine codes. It was within this milieu that Giorgio Armani emerged, beginning the deconstruction of the classic tailored suit: he removed internal structures, lightened the silhouette, rejected linings, and allowed the body to “feel the wool.” Armani put it plainly: “My fashion is not unisex; it demands softness for men and strength for women.” His fashion does not erase difference; it redistributes qualities.
Alongside this, another pole of Italian masculinity took shape: Gianni Versace, Dolce & Gabbana, Mauro Calugi, and Danilo Giannelli proposed a hyper-masculine body—leather, metal, knit “armor,” eroticized display. Italian menswear, at that moment, was balancing between tailoring tradition and vitalist eroticism.
This tension found a new form in the mid-1990s, when Tom Ford became Gucci’s creative director (1994). Ford reinterpreted the house’s heritage through the lens of his personal memories of New York club culture, creating a masculinity in which sexuality became the central aesthetic axis. Gucci—founded in 1921 as a house of high-end leather goods—was decisively repositioned as a brand that works with desire as a visual language.
The next decisive turn came in 2015, when Alessandro Michele became Gucci’s creative director. In his very first runway show, he sent out a slouchy pussy-bow shirt paired with tailored trousers—a gesture critics read as a manifesto against traditional gender normativity. His collections began to be interpreted as a sustained deconstruction of historically established masculinity.
The culmination of this trajectory is Gucci Menswear Autumn/Winter 2020, titled “Masculine, plural.” The title itself marks a refusal of a single norm. The collection explicitly declares an intention to “release the constraint”—to free masculinity from rigid frames—while paying respect to Tom Ford’s aesthetic legacy and recapturing the atmosphere of 1970s Italian fashion within the demands of contemporary social awareness.
Just as Romeo Gigli once worked with spezzato—an already existing tailoring code that can be “translated” into a new language—Michele distorts recognizable signs and assembles his own design lexicon from them. His protagonists are “certainly uncertain men”: men in muslin and lurex, soft in gait, unconcerned with defining their sexuality according to traditional canons. Here appear bows, ribbons, jabots, flowing fabrics—not as quotation, but as an expansion of the masculine vocabulary of form and surface, and a return to a decorative register that has always existed in menswear, even if it has, at times, been displaced by the “norm” of strict construction.
Designing what Michele calls “uniforms for desertion,” he no longer works with form as authority, but with the sensuous needs of the male body. In doing so, he continues an Italian line that, for decades, has expressed masculinity not through hardness, but through materiality, corporeality, and the feel of fabric against the skin.
From spezzato in Romeo Gigli to “Masculine, plural” at Gucci, this is the story of how menswear learns—again—to speak the language of fabric and the body.
