MILAN – The fashion crowd is not new to social events but the one Sunnei is planning to host on Saturday here might be unprecedented.
Placeholders at the seated dinner to be staged at the brand’s Palazzina Sunnei headquarter will read the names of press members, friends of the house — and a little more. Mr. Darcy, Richie Tenenbaum and Seth Cohen are all down to attend the event, so no risk of dull moments for sure.
The gimmick is Sunnei’s latest fun move. The brand’s Loris Messina and Simone Rizzo are well-known in the circuit for their unpredictable show formats imbued with irony and social commentary. But this time they met their match in Lessico Familiare, the Italian indie brand the duo decided to endorse during Milan Men’s Fashion Week offering a location for its presentation.
Founded during the pandemic and rooted in sustainability, Lessico Familiare is the brainchild of Riccardo Scaburri, Alberto Petillo and Alice Curti, who met each other while attending the NABA fashion, art and design school. After taking different paths in the industry, in 2020 they decided to launch the quirky label by looking at what their domestic environment could offer. Hence, curtains, mat, and discarded clothes were upcycled to turn a “familiar lexicon” (as the brand’s name translates to in English) into new artisanal pieces, which are marked by a froufrou and a bit costume-y aesthetic rich in bows, flounces and patchworks.
For fall 2024, this approach informed the reinterpretation of iconic looks of fictional characters or real personalities of pop culture, which have occupied Lessico Familiare’s universe of references built via glossy magazines and TV series marathons. These characters’ key outfits were dismantled, reassembled and magnified in exaggerated proportions without taking into consideration functionality, with patchworks of fabrics, ruffles, lace inserts clashing in a concise lineup with no chromatic coherence or silhouette cohesiveness.
Dubbed “Literally Me,” the collection will include 17 looks openly nodding to the likes of Nina Simone, Cindy Sherman, Joan Didion and Natalia Ginzburg, whose book “Family Lexicon” inspired the name of the indie brand.
Each personality was chosen for a specific reason, as listed in a press note reading: “Martin Luther, for the reform. Cecilia Lisbon, for her frankness. Florence Welch, for the lungs… Gwyneth Paltrow, for Goop. Sofia Coppola, for the girls… Luke Danes, for coffee. Seth Cohen (with Spider-man’s mask) for indie pride. Lady Diana, for everything.”
While Lessico Familiare is not new to pop references — the “Cocktail” range unveiled last year already had nods to “Desperate Housewives” and “The O.C.” characters — the statement revealed the ironic tone-of-voice the brand shares with Sunnei.
“The collaboration with Sunnei traces back to before the summer, when we had a chat with Loris and Simone after having met them at one of our presentations,” recalled Scaburri. “If I think about our aesthetics, I can’t find any points in common and that’s why we find this tie-up so fun and effective: there is a cross-pollination of ideas, but without distorting the project. Then I think about irony, conveyed in a different way, and I believe that’s what connects us.”
Scaburri said that the idea for the brand’s lineup originated in an outfit seen in Coppola’s 2013 movie “Bling Ring.” “We asked ourselves: ‘Do we really have to think about new garments from scratch?’ No, because there are some wonderful ones we have always been in love with, worn by icons that nourish the imagination of the brand. And to these characters, to whom we partly owe our ethical and aesthetic education, we have decided to dedicate this collection.”
Sunnei’s founders didn’t want to contaminate the range with their own fashion codes, but support the project by providing the venue and ensuring higher visibility to the brand via their network of contacts.
“We know how difficult the location issue can be, especially at the beginning, and having already used our space for our shows, we thought we would make the space available to them and create a special moment,” said Messina.
“As always, the idea is to enter Palazzina Sunnei by opening your mind to everything that can happen inside. The guests know that they are invited to a dinner and that the new collection of Lessico Familiare will also be presented on the occasion,” he continued, keeping further details on the format under wraps.
This is the latest in a streak of initiatives that have Rizzo and Messina support emerging talents across different industries, spanning from design to media.
“It has always been clear to us that the term Sunnei had to refer to something that goes far beyond the items available in our store,” said Rizzo. “More than a brand, it is a speaker of creative expressions and perhaps also for this reason it doesn’t seem weird to us to help another reality like Lessico Familiare… We were in these guys’ shoes not long ago, so we know what it means and we remember all the mistakes we had to make to eventually learn.”
Rizzo believes “there are no project like Lessico Familiare in Milan” as he praised the brand for its “very spontaneous way of answering to current needs, such as minimizing waste and overproduction” and underscored that such a choice was “the result of their vision and not due to following trends or labeling themselves in any way.”
At the same time, the Sunnei founders believed that the project hadn’t expressed its full potential yet and wanted to offer their experience to mentor them. The approach is in sync with previous initiatives of the duo, like launching their first mentorship program in collaboration with the Milan-based fashion, art and design school Nuova Accademia di Belle Arti, better known as NABA, in 2022.
Last year, founders also sponsored the release of Media, an indie illustrated publication that Rizzo and Messina supported from the issue’s concept definition to launch event celebrated at the Sunnei flagship in Milan. Founders discovered the magazine in 2021, kick-starting a two-year collaborative journey that culminated in an issue filled with different four-handed graphic projects and a layout challenging the viewer’s perception.
