MILAN, ITALY — Matteo Tamburini’s self-reflective, meditative approach to design has filled the shoes of legions of traditional aficionados, celebrating the vernacular of craftsmanship by subtly subverting artsy twists on timeless classics. So it’s only fitting that this time out, he expanded his design horizons.
Spring/ Summer 2027 wasn’t a sea change for Tod’s, but it did see him digging into the things he loves and challenging himself to incorporate stuff he hates. There was a nice, soft sense of tension here. As far as the “loves” go, he found several ways to elaborate his signature leather separates, adopting the styles into outerwear, footwear and bags, and particularly good-looking trench coats.
He also worked up new colour iterations of natural gradients he debuted over the last few seasons; here, he made the look more skin-baring and sexy, in keeping with the collection’s overarching themes of gauzy offerings and sharp cutouts. As for “hate,” it’s the word he used to describe the feeling about the necessity of being boxed by defined themes as seasons go by; rather, he was keen for SS27 to feel more directional.
“We asked ourselves a very simple question. How do you build a personal imagination? And how does it become a personal style over time?” he muses. “Obviously, to answer this question and to be a bit self-referential, I thought of myself and what shaped me. Obviously, Italian culture was a fundamental part, but I also belong to a generation that began to travel with the mind very early,” he shares.
In the 1990s, Tamburini began to note images, films and a plethora of influences. “We were learning more about the world,” he says. “And so, in the collection, we wanted to translate this approach, not in a nostalgic way, as we didn’t necessarily want to refer to a specific period, but we tried to understand how this desire contributes to building a style. The desire to become, to imagine ourselves elsewhere, and the freedom to reinterpret what we change through the sensitivity of what we are.”
Starting from this assumption, Tamburini yearned to stitch together different codes that come from a wealth of worlds. “So we’ll find the part more inspired by the formal world, which is actually an approach that we have already tackled in the collections, close to a more dynamic, functional world,” he shares.
“The formal part, in this case, loses rigidity, while the functional one, which is more dynamic, acquires an elevated aspect, and what we gain is the portrait of a woman who goes through these two worlds without trying to define them too much,” he then adds.
“Two worlds, rather adjacent, in which we have not tried to solve the differences, but rather to maintain them and make them speak together: I wanted the collection to have this same kind of immediacy and that it seemed lived, speaking of personal style, with a more spontaneous approach to clothing, rather than built. This is the general goal.” The references to lightness come from further touchpoints.
“This season we wanted to avoid artistic references at all costs, but to evoke an atmosphere throughout the world without going too far into the specifics,” he shares. “We started trying to translate these graphics in very simple forms. I’m not in for too complicated constructions,” he concludes. “Sometimes, in reality, simplicity is simply supporting a square or something very simple. On a woman’s body, for me, it’s enough.” All in all, this was a typically welcome effort from Tamburini, and a fuss-free one too.
by Chidozie Obasi