Wallpaper* Handmade 2011: The Products

‘Cape' suit, by Konstantin Grcic and Brioni

Konstantin Grcic may be the pre-eminent, certainly the most prolific, industrial designer of the era. But what he is not - by his own admission - is a fashion designer. But when we approached Grcic to be part of this year's Handmade project - and of course we had to - working with a tailor was one of the first ideas he threw at us.

Initially, his idea was to come to London's Savile Row. But we thought it made far more sense to put Grcic together with Brioni, the standard bearer of bespoke Italian tailoring, and see if they could come up with a centrepiece for our Handmade exhibition in Milan.

If Grcic was going to take on tailoring, it wasn't going to be by reinventing the bespoke suit. Looking through some of the Brioni archive material, Grcic came across an image of a young man wearing a cape and fell in love with the idea of a suit that reworked that idea and offered the wearer something like a personal environment, a two-piece suit with domestic powers of comfort.

The challenge for Angelo Petrucci, Brioni's master tailor, and Grcic was to produce a suit that from the outside was all about an elegant drape, about fluidity and movement, but that from the inside had the reassuring architecture of a made-to-measure suit, the security of a proper fit.

www.brioni.com
www.konstantin-grcic.com

Photography: Ricardo Bagnoli