Ten Meets Stefano Pilati, Who Wears Random Identities On The Cover Of 10 Magazine Issue 71
By Paul Toner
In June, Pharrell Williams’s eagerly awaited debut show for Louis Vuitton played out like a game of who’s who in the glistening world of the creative elite. The front row had a collective Instagram following that would outnumber most major nations, while artists, photographers and hip-hop royalty appeared on the catwalk. Walking alongside them – shielded behind bug-eye sunglasses with pearl-accented eyelashes and wearing a womanly jacket adorned with a diamond-encrusted iteration of the house’s Damier pattern – was Stefano Pilati.
Just another handsome model to some in attendance, but to others – true fashion people – the rare sighting of one of the industry’s finest-dressed men was enough to cause a chorus of audible gasps across the Pont Neuf, Paris’s oldest bridge, where the show was being held.
The bearded Stefano Pilati in front of me cuts a quieter figure. Zooming from his office in Berlin, he wears a red workwear shirt. His hair, a symphony of greys and browns, is wetted and slicked back, revealing “Freedom of Behaviour”, his label’s genderless ethos, tattooed along his hairline. “Everything is upside down!” he says, having just returned from a holiday to Sicily, where the weather was dreary. “We came back to Berlin and it was actually warm and sunny. It doesn’t make any sense.” A few weeks shy of his big catwalk moment – in the same season he would also star in a lookbook for Anonymous Club, the avant-garde Hood By Air offshoot – he gives me no inkling that he’ll appear in the show.
Posing for the photographs that appear in these pages did serve as a healthy warm-up, though. He wears pieces pulled from his personal archive as well as current collections from rising talents and industry heavyweights, many of whom he calls friends (Kim Jones and Jonathan Anderson included).
“It’s always a bit difficult for me to be the model,” he says. His hair, noticeably longer than the laddish locks of his younger years, helped him get into character: “There was a moment [when] I felt like Anne Bancroft, or Meryl Streep in The Devil Wears Prada, that kind of woman. Powerful.”
Exploring the gender barriers we impose on ourselves is at the core of Pilati’s own label Random Identities, which he launched in 2017 after relocating to Berlin from Milan, his hometown. Mostly monochromatic in colour palette, his tailoring-first collections don’t feel masculine, nor particularly feminine either. “I always tried to be very clear on what the message is, to propose fashion that is for every gender,” he says, “but it also starts from a personal experience, as a cis gay man and as a fashion designer. How do I express my femininity? Is it a projection or is it a physical experience?”
The birth of Random Identities was a surprising shift for Pilati, 57, who has spent his entire design career working for the biggest womenswear and menswear houses in the world of luxury. He cut his teeth assisting Italian couturier Nino Cerruti, before landing a job at Giorgio Armani as a menswear design assistant in 1993. Two years later, he would move to Prada to head up its research and development department, before joining Tom Ford as design director of Yves Saint Laurent in 2000. Succeeding Ford as the house’s lead designer four years later, he would go on to helm YSL for eight years.
His collections, although sometimes met with mixed reviews, are now credited as being ahead of their time, having ushered in a slew of trends that would populate the Noughties, particularly the tulip skirt. His designs also played host to a wealth of clever adaptations of Yves Saint Laurent signatures, like the sober renderings of Le Smoking for AW09, in the wake of the economic crash of the previous year.
Pilati’s beefy CV would continue to thicken in 2013, when he would head up Ermenegildo Zegna’s menswear couture arm, as well as the group’s womenswear label, Agnona. For three years, he cleverly modified men’s classics; his collections were underpinned with a quiet sensuality that elegantly casualised the brand’s opulent tailoring. When he left, in 2016, he found himself re-evaluating the work. “It was really a moment where I had to reflect on the fact that Stefano Pilati existed without fashion,” he says. But why Berlin? “It felt like a difficult landing place but definitely a city where you don’t feel the pressure of your work, so you focus on your inner self.”
Living in Milan or Paris, he says, you’re inundated with fashion to the point of suffocation. “I was under enormous pressure and that pressure is simply that you’re surrounded by fashion people, fashion stores. You pass by them every day; there are news kiosks that have gigantic campaigns. It becomes a lot.”
The demand “to do good, do new, do relevant”, as Pilati puts it, hasn’t followed him to the German capital, which shares a stronger kinship with strobe-lit dance floors than poncy fashion get-togethers. “That’s why Berlin helped me very much in this creative journey; here, nobody really cares. It’s very free.”
Birthing Random Identities, he says, “was a reflection on whether fashion needed a new brand. What would the role of the brand be? What is the role of the fashion designer, especially someone like me? How can I capitalise on my experience, staying loyal to the fact that I’m a believer in fashion? I’m not necessarily a believer in brands. I’m always drawn by the experience of wearing clothes.” He pictures the brand as “rewriting” the design codes that have followed him throughout his career, but now creatively fed by the young hedonists he’s befriended out and about at Berlin’s most revered clubs, Berghain included.
“Youths here, they weren’t really questioning their gender; they would just dress according to their feelings. What I’m experiencing [in Berlin] translates into the clothes, worn by beautiful identities. They may be random, but they signify something which I think fashion should be a part of, which is the social fabric. I don’t think fashion is there any more – it’s just about consumption. For me, fashion is way more abstract, it becomes tangible with the craft.”
The brand’s approach to cut and silhouette is defiantly Stefano. Louche tailoring is collaged with workwear influences and peppered with clever collisions of masc and femme (be it bras printed onto dress shirts or classic men’s trousers paired with 3.25-inch heeled boots). Sold direct-to-consumer by the likes of Ssense and Dover Street Market, the designer is driven by accessibility. “I don’t want [the brand] to be luxurious,” he says. “If I didn’t work for Saint Laurent, if I didn’t work for Prada, if I didn’t work for Armani, the brand would’ve been perceived as provocative. Everything looks rich and is well done, but it’s mostly made of polyester. I guess that luxury feeling is intrinsic.”
Pilati has never been able to find a uniform and still revels in the ritual of getting dressed. He lives and works in the same building in Tiergarten and describes piecing an outfit together each morning as “research on silhouettes”. As we speak, for instance, he’s wearing a pair of jeans he hasn’t put on for “at least 20, if not 30 years”.
He likes to style a look both on himself and his muse MJ Harper – the multimedia artist, dancer and choreographer – before deciding what he’ll don that day, “so the life of the clothes and the message can be shown in all its layers”.
His extensive personal archive is housed in a mirrored closet which stretches the length of a room; it’s strewn with vintage Chanel, Margiela and Comme des Garçons: “Rei Kawakubo is my favourite designer in the world.” Although he’s not a big shopper these days, he’s particularly excited about New York’s fresh vanguard – Telfar, Luar and Vaquera included – and despite fashion’s changing face in the storm of AI, believes what he dubs “modern elegance” will prevail.
“Modern elegance, it comes from the mind, it comes from the head. Be very conscious that fashion should serve you and that, in itself, is another elegant attitude. Also, elegance is being ready to accept everything that changes. I think modern elegance is being a bit more philosophical about your way of dressing and the approach to fashion because it’s where you can also discover, have fun and find yourself in a different way than you once thought.” In the words of Pilati we trust.
