Ermenegildo Zegna Couture

Ermenegildo Zegna Couture launched in 2013 as the runway expression of the Zegna group. The label sat above the main Ermenegildo Zegna line and took on the house’s most ambitious tailoring and material work.

Gildo Zegna recruited Stefano Pilati that same year, naming him head of design after his eight-year tenure at Yves Saint Laurent. The new label gave Pilati a platform to extend Zegna’s mill-driven heritage into a fully designed editorial proposition. His brief shaped the line around fluid tailoring, cloth pulled from the family’s Trivero mills, and a sartorial-meets-personal sensibility closer to a designer’s own wardrobe than to a corporate menswear catalog.

Pilati presented his collections at Milan Fashion Week between 2013 and 2016. He designed out of Zegna’s Milan and Trivero operations while drawing the visual temperature of the line from Berlin, where he had relocated after leaving Saint Laurent.

The clothes came draped and elongated. Monastic coats sat over wide trousers, asymmetric closures ran across raw silk shirting, sandals paired with deep autumnal suiting, and surface treatments came straight from the family’s textile archive. The work placed Zegna Couture inside a specific strain of designer-led Italian menswear, alongside what Dries Van Noten and Haider Ackermann were doing in the same window. Critics including Tim Blanks credited Pilati with raising the house’s editorial standing across his tenure.

Pilati stepped down in February 2016 after showing the fall-winter 2016 collection, closing the chapter he had been brought in to define.

Alessandro Sartori succeeded him that same month as artistic director across all Zegna lines. The appointment was a homecoming. Sartori had joined the group in 1989, launched Z Zegna in 2003 and run it through 2011, then spent five years in Paris developing Berluti’s ready-to-wear universe.

His first Couture show arrived fall-winter 2017 at HangarBicocca. The collection reshaped the line around loosened tailoring, technical fabrics, and the new XXX Couture symbol applied to leather goods and the Tiziano sneaker.

In 2021, the group consolidated Ermenegildo Zegna, Ermenegildo Zegna Couture, and Z Zegna under a single Zegna identity ahead of its NYSE listing, retiring Couture as a standalone label. The eight-year arc from Pilati’s 2013 launch to the 2021 unification marks the period when Zegna extended its tailoring archive into runway editorial territory, the platform that gave Pilati his second act and seeded Sartori’s full brand reset.