Lessico Familiare is a merry band of four Italians—Riccardo Scaburri, Alice Curti, and Alberto Petillo (who met as students and launched the label in 2020) and new member/image director, Vittoria Santarelli—who don’t just talk about change in fashion, but walk the walk. Winners of the 2022 Vogue Italia / Who Is On Next? Franca Sozzani Award, they work with upcycled and found materials to create imaginative worlds and one-of-kind-garments. The brand has been taken under the wing of the Sozzani Foundation, where they presented today and in 2023, and last season Sunnei lent them the space to show. Going into year five, they are starting to get some traction at retail with stockists in Japan that, Scaburri noted on a call, “understand our poetry,” and a recent installation at Dover Street Market Paris.
The brand name, Lessico Familiare, is adapted from Lessico Famigliare (Family Sayings), a 1963 novel by Natalia Ginzburg, and their work stays closes to home in the sense that they often make use of (familiar) home textiles and furnishings. This season’s work is titled Abecedario (the alphabet), and the idea was that the letters would be the models. “Every single letter is going to have an object, a color, a movie, a character, a dress that belongs to our world,” Scaburri said. Only a half dozen or so of the letters are garments, the rest are physical objects and photographs of flea markets finds. All of these, plus commissioned text, have been gathered together into a small book (see the pages below).
“I hope people will understand it; I don’t want them to think that it’s just a table full of objects, I want them to understand that the alphabet is the runway, and the letters are going to be our cast,” Scaburri said. “If a stylist asks us for look number six (which is F) they are going to receive an actual object. We were always thinking that one day we wanted to do something different from just garments,” the designer continued, “and since the brand started from a novel, we went back to the novel, we went back to the alphabet, to the sentences, the letters, the words, and that’s why we wanted to create our own alphabet. And in this collection, there are not just our letters; we asked Jonathan Buzzi, a young Italian writer, to write small stories about five letters.”
Fashion’s relationship to literature has taken varied forms over the years. Stories, such as Lewis Carroll’s Alice in Wonderland, have inspired shoots. At Gucci, for fall 2017, Alessandro Michele issued an LP with readings from William Blake and Jane Austen as an invitation, and designed clutches in the form of Austen novels. Kim Jones had T. S. Eliot’s The Waste Land read aloud at his fall 2023 Dior Men show, and Christian Dior himself is famous for giving letter names—H and Y—to his ever-changing silhouettes. This LF collection payed direct tribute to three female authors (Ginzburg, Jane Austen, and Virginia Woolf) but the team took the idea of language beyond reference point and into experience that is connected to a realm bigger than fashion. Scaburri put it this way: “I love the idea of escapism in terms of inspiration. Maybe I need to create my own bubble, but in the end this bubble, it’s in a world—you have to deal with what is happening.” This collection, he continued, is a “reflection on the importance of the words, how we use words. A good picture is no longer enough, I feel like there should be words as well as the eye, and smell, as well as the thought and the mind too.”
