Timely and timeless, Salvatore Ferragamo’s collection for Pre-Fall 2021 uses the learnings of 2020 to meet the yearning for fashion’s new essentials. While defined by their season – this carefully edited collection has been designed to arrive at retail at its point of maximum usefulness – these are pieces also designed to transcend it.
Ferragamo’s heritage of artisan expertise has been channeled into the creation of leather garments, shoes and accessories that will endure and improve with wear and that will fit seamlessly and enrichingly alongside pre-existing pieces in a Ferragamo wardrobe. Sustainability and focus are key elements, both in production and aesthetic.
“We talk about modernity as if it is a fleeting moment in time – the latest, state-of-the art chapter in culture and aesthetics,” says creative director Paul Andrew: “but the truth is we have been living in the Age of Modernity for over a century now. The modern sense of beauty and style is subject to circumstantial glitch and fluctuation, but key elements of it remain eternal. For Pre-Fall 2021 we drew from that past, considered our very particular present, and used these inspirations to propose a collection that is future-proof. Ferragamo’s enduring values of excellence and craft serve the creation of objects of quality and comfort.
They are also an explicit rejection of fashion’s cycle of enforced obsolescence, a cycle which I strongly believe is itself now obsolete. We shot this lookbook in Florence’s Manifattura Tabacchi because this repurposed industrial space in our hometown has been masterfully renewed from its original function – a 1940s tobacco factory – into a flexible, sustainable, innovative, progressive and creative space enjoyed by citizens across the city. That really resonated.”
Key pillars in the Ferragamo wardrobe include leather dressing – pieces for women and men crafted in the material of our proprietary expertise – as well as deeply textured knitwear, precise yet versatile outerwear, shirt dresses and shirting, and transitional garments crafted in double-faced wools and cashmere. Nylons are recycled, wools are sustainable, and leathers repurposed and upcycled.
The collection is approximately 50 per cent the size of 2020’s equivalent, a development which is not a reduction, but a refinement – a conscious distillation. Decorative punctuation marks include a boldly modern – yet archive-based – geometric pattern based on a 20th century Ferragamo tie design. A three layer dress, cinched at the waist and crafted in Technicolor yellow chiffon, exemplifies the complexity of crafting apparent simplicity. In menswear a series of pieces in recycled nylon or leather, embossed or stitched with the house Gancini relief, epitomises Ferragamo’s heritage of artisanship and philosophy of technical innovation.
View this post on Instagram
As ever at Ferragamo, footwear is the foundation of everything above. Key styles for Pre-Fall include technical sandals crafted in leathers and nylons for both genders, an ultra-light crepe-soled, chisel-toe moulded-sole Chelsea boot for women, and a double-welted lug-sole Chelsea boot for men. Key bags include the versatile Trifolio presented in a new shoulder-bag iteration, while for men a series of silver-accented body bags in Gancini embossed leather and nylon offer fresh functionality.
