Take a trip with us to Casa Zegna.
Should you be in need of a role model, you could do no better than to immerse yourself into the life and times of Ermenegildo Zegna. In the 1920s, after establishing a thriving wool mill in the northern Italian town of Trivero, Zegna planted 500,000 conifer trees on a nearby mountain that had been deforested during World War I. Over the next century, those trees flourished into the Oasi Zegna, a vast conservation area spanning nearly 40 square miles. To visit now is to see a man’s vision come to its most beautiful fruition: an expanse of majestic mountains covered in a carpet of green. Threading through it is the Panoramica, a road Ermenegildo would zoom along in his sleek Lancia Aurelia, gustily inhaling the cool, pine-and-wild-herb-scented Alpine air.
Zegna’s new Memorie fragrance collection seeks to capture sensorial snapshots such as these. Smelling A Trivero (an olfactive road trip, with whiffs of leather and myrrh), Il Sottobosco (an earthy green scent evocative of forest undergrowth), or La Panoramica (a fresh fougere redolent with fir and lavender) might be the next best thing to riding shotgun through the Oasi with Ermenegildo at the wheel.
Consisting of six fragrances, the lineup was created by three of the biggest rock stars in the world of scent: perfumers Dominique Ropion, Fabrice Pellegrin, and Quentin Bisch. Each came to the Zegna HQ in Trivero to absorb the atmosphere, stories, and tradition of quality and community that Ermenegildo established. When you enter the original mill, built in 1910, you are greeted by a series of murals painted by Ettore Pistoletto Olivero. Commissioned by Ermenegildo in 1947 to paint the cycles of wool craftsmanship (many of which are still in play today including combing the wool with dried thistles to enhance its texture), it’s a signal that this is a place where the work of human hands and minds is of utmost value.
You can follow in Ermenegildo’s footsteps across the factory floor, where looms move at lightning-speed to weave Zegna’s immaculate fabrics. Here, the warm, vanilla-like smell of clean wool drifts through the air, mingling with the metallic tang of machinery—an impression perfectly captured in Il Lanificio, one of Pellegrin’s creations for the Memorie line. Ermenegildo’s office is preserved precisely as he left it: a wood-paneled room containing a host of black-and-white family photographs, an ornately carved desk, ink blotters, wool samples, and the notebooks in which he sketched new fabrics and designs. Here, Ropion dreamed up Il Calamaio, a leathery amber with a touch of oud and an ink accord that conjures Ermenegildo’s freshly ironed morning newspaper and the inkwell into which he dipped his pen.
For Zegna artistic director Alessandro Sartori, the goal of creating these scents was to bring people into the world of Zegna through the intangible power of emotion. The scents each represent a moment that Ermenegildo would have experienced, but their ability to connect is universal. “We chose these moments, like chapters, that would reveal parts of his life, from his personal time with his family to his work to his drives through the Oasi,” Sartori says. “Six was the absolute minimum that we needed to tell the story, and this is just the beginning.”
Sartori wanted to break with the approach most brands take to making scents and so Memorie is presented in terms of the atmosphere each creates rather than a list of notes. “A fragrance allows you to forget everything else while you are smelling it,” he says. “And when we developed these scents, we were not thinking about whether or not they would sell, because when you think about those things you cannot be creative. I truly think there is space for a different way of thinking and our vision is to create emotions. It is not about choosing a scent because of an ingredient that you know.”
Zegna, in addition to being a menswear brand, supplies wool to other luxury houses, and the company is revered for its exquisite materials and expertise. Sartori speaks eloquently and lovingly about details such as the cut of a collar or the fit of a sleeve. He compares the sensation of encountering a quality fragrance to that of feeling fabric for the first time. “They are both emotional experiences,” he says. “When you touch the best fibers, like cashmere, vicuna, or linen, some are softer, some are thicker or have a different weave. It’s very tactile. There is something of a parallel in smelling a fragrance. It’s about how you feel when you experience the best raw materials.”
The sixth scent in the Memorie collection is the sweetest, in more ways than one. Conceived as a celebration of quiet evenings Ermenegildo spent with his family in their splendid Art Deco home adjacent to the mill, Saga Del Piemonte was inspired by Rapa Giovanni Rataffia, a black cherry liquor enjoyed as a nightcap. Warm and enveloping as a cashmere blanket by a fireplace, it’s Sartori’s personal favorite fragrance in the lineup. “It reminds me of that moment in my own family,” he says. “In my house where I grew up, we would stop everything at 8pm and sit down to dinner together to talk about our days and our lives. It was a very special time.”
As for who he imagines will wear the Memorie fragrances? Sartori is clear: “He is not a show-off but a man with good taste and a lot of passion. We remember interesting men more than we do beautiful men, so this is someone with a strong aura, who knows himself, but is not perfect. His persona is acquired through age, because I think men are much chicer at 80 than they are at 30. And he’s not macho at all. His fragility is part of his beauty.” In other words, these fragrances are about as far from AXE as you can get. And just like a beautiful Zegna sweater or a cashmere scarf, they can be especially delicious when worn by a woman. Perhaps most powerfully of all, they suggest we consider the interplay between past, present, and future—something that, like fragrance itself, can imbue life’s smallest moments with greater meaning.
Photography courtesy of Zegna.
