For Pal Zileri’s new campaign, British actor Freddy Drabble and artist Reece Cox stroll through a series of vast, untamed landscapes – dirt tracks, craggy outcrops and windswept coastlines form suitably cinematic backdrops for the main event: the Italian brand’s SS25 ‘Be Effortless’ collection.
The collection couldn’t be more of the moment – relaxed enough to fit into post-Covid convention, but with enough formal flair to ensure you can glide gracefully through any crowd or occasion. It channels the kind of sprezzatura that has defined the best of Italian fashion for generations.
Rewind to the early 1980s in Northern Italy. Songs from Franco Battiato, FR David, and Lucio Dalla dominate the radio waves while designs by Giorgio Armani, Stone Island, and Franco Moschino fill the pages of glossy fashion magazines.
Italian fashion is ‘having a moment’ – not for the first time, and certainly not for the last. The poppy, hippie designs of the 1960s and 1970s are replaced with a relaxed Milanese simplicity, and the colours del giorno shift from ‘mustard’ and ‘sky blue’ to ‘mushroom’, ‘sandy beige’, and ‘cool grey’.
Those who can afford genuine designer clothing are envied, and labelled the Milano bene. In contrast, ambitious young men huddle together in sandwich shops, racking their brains trying to figure out how to achieve the same loosely tailored, cuffed-jean looks as the models in the magazines they pore over.
Known as the paninari, these boys would either save every lira to purchase the real thing, buy the closest copy, or cheat a little by asking their mothers to stitch a genuine logo over the top. For many, their passion for fashion became an obsession.
Leone Scordo, CEO of Pal Zileri – another coveted, luxury menswear brand founded in this era – definitely had the passion. He lets me in on a little secret: “Men love beauty the same as women.”
As a young man in the 1980s, Scordo hoarded his pocket money so he could spend it on clothes at the Sunday mercato in Milan. Each week, he’d clip and compile pictures from magazines to be shared with the shopkeepers on the weekend. Not wealthy enough to afford the real thing, and seemingly too sophisticated to purchase knockoffs, he often went for a high-low look: unbranded jeans and an Armani-esque mushroom blazer, or sleek trousers and a linen shirt. His foundational belief that ‘fashion should be democratic,’ has carried him through those scrounging-for-change years, to now, running one of Italy’s most prestigious heritage brands.
Scordo joined Pal Zileri five years ago, when the world of fashion was undergoing another massive shift in the wake of the Covid pandemic. Formal tailoring was out and sweatpants were in. Rather than throwing money at fast fashion (to just wear around their house), consumers became increasingly conscious of their purchases, looking to brands such as Pal Zileri for their daily essentials.
Scordo was brought on in response to that shift, and in the years since, has turned the company around completely.
As we begin to look at refreshing our wardrobes for the summer, Pal Zileri’s new Be Effortless collection is the latest impressive release under Scordo’s stewardship.
We caught up with the charismatic CEO to learn more…
Square Mile: What does ‘Be Effortless’ mean to you?
Leo Scordo: Being effortless means wearing confidence as a second skin, dressing to reveal who you already are, and not become someone else.
SM: And how does that mindset translate to the design language of a menswear collection?
LS: We speak in silhouettes, textures, and the quiet confidence of knowing what feels right. Simplicity is power. We honour the clean line, the well-fitted jacket, the shirt that falls just right. We embrace the luxury of not needing to decide who to be each morning, but the power of expressing a personal style through an outfit that feels never out of place.
SM: What are some of your favourite pieces from the collection, and why?
LS: My favourite piece is the Vicenza suit – made from a beautiful, luxurious yet understated fabric, well-tailored, allowing freedom of movement, and perhaps paired with one of our cotton and silk knit polos for a look that’s elegant, yet at the same time modern and relaxed.
SM: How much does the pandemic continue to influence fashion trends – and will it be long-lasting?
LS: It changed it, but in my opinion that change will not be permanent; it will go back. The pandemic brought about this relaxed approach to design – a kind of homogenised collection from everybody at every price. You can now mix and match pieces from H&M to Hermès, which is good, because it’s more democratic, but it’s hard for fashion to survive in this world.
Now, every brand is starting to differentiate from one another with their own DNA. Some of them with logos, others with super-cool designs – in our case, it will be branding our products with the essence of our archive’s DNA, leaning into the depth of our products.
Our wool fabrics have been known since the 1980s for their colouration, and for having a depth of fibre and construction of fabric. Pal Zileri’s competitors – Zegna, Canali, Corneliani – have always been known for having classic colours. It could be pinstripe, glen check, which are normally dark on light blue, or tone on tone, whereas we are known for having green with red; aubergine with a touch of violet. Not the entire collection, of course, but there will always be pieces like this.
SM: We hear you’re looking for a new flagship in London?
LS: We are. What we’re trying to find is the right place for what we want to be: not for what we used to be, but for what we want to be.
SM: Can you articulate what that is exactly? How does it differ?
LS: Being a sartorial menswear lifestyle collection, but not necessarily too tailored. When you say ‘sartorial’, people think of jackets for older men like me, but ‘sartorial’ can be a jacket for a younger guy with jeans or a T-shirt. These days, sartorial goes from the customer to the product, to the merchandising. To be modern, we have to stick to our DNA of tailoring, but expand into new product categories, like leisurewear (which we already did). That will be for a younger, effortless guy who will wear menswear not in a stiff way, but in a more relaxed, easy way.
SM: Since you’re evolving with the times, and leaning into relaxed garments worn by both men and women, is there a chance they’ll become genderless garments?
LS: It’s still menswear. Because to be genderless you have to have a strength in your brand message that we still don’t have. Not even Zegna is able to be genderless. The brand Pal Zileri is so linked with heritage of tailoring construction and menswear that it would be like following the trend to say ‘OK, we are genderless’ but it only works if you were born genderless. We were born in menswear, and that’s why we will stick with menswear.
SM: Are you shifting the focus to London?
LS: London will be the focus in the UK. The brand has been known in the UK for many years, and used to be very successful here. Today it is doing well, but with a limited perimeter – we are only in Harrods and a few independents.
The UK is a market that I like a lot; the shapes of British tailoring, the designs. They’re different from the Italian design, which to me, is more modern, very straight. In my opinion, the only city that has real universal attire is London. This is the one place where I recognise myself like when I’m in New York. I’m at home in Paris, same in Berlin – but London is the European version of New York.
I want to collect the feedback from an international environment because this city will also be the first step to the US. We want to go to the US, but I’m not able to just open five shops in America in a day. We have to learn; to get the feedback from a certain number of American customers that are coming [here]. I don’t want to be a Pal Zileri selling only at Saks and Neiman Marcus.
The only city that has real universal attire is London
SM: So you have your mind set to international expansion, and you’ve altered the merchandise selection to be more lifestyle inclusive. Are you expanding the line of clothing or merely changing it?
LS: Over the last three years, the company has undergone a big turnaround in terms of dimension, but also in terms of collection. The collections were enormous, without a clear direction. When I joined, we reduced the collection by 70%. A lot of the collections were product driven. High quality? Sure. Clear idea? I’m not so sure.
SM: Did any of your regular customers comment on such a major change?
LS: Not even one single client said ‘You reduced the collection?’ because they were so huge, that even after cutting them down they were still enough. Then we merged the first and second lines, for three reasons.
Firstly, I don’t like second lines, because if you cannot afford it, then you don’t buy. It’s like the Premier League versus the second league.
Secondly, if I have to spend money on marketing for Pal Zileri, then I’ll spend money on marketing for Pal Zileri. If I have a second line named ‘PZ Lab’, for example, what’s the advantage of spending money on that? Leo Scordo ‘lab’, Pal Zileri ‘lab’ – everyone can have a lab. So we merged the collections.
Finally, we moved from 90% tailored suits to only 30% – and then the remaining 70% on leisure categories; the market reaction was exactly in line with our decision, and we broke even a year and a half in advance.
SM: I know that it’s your job to be invested in the company, but you also seem so invested in fashion more generally. What is it that so appeals to you about the fashion industry? Before Pal Zileri you were at CP, and before CP, Zegna…
LS: Yes, and before Zegna was Borsalino. When I went to college, I was taking the train from my home village to Milan every week, and I didn’t have a lot of money. I bought all the fashion magazines, full of 1980s Armani, Moschino, which I didn’t have the money to buy. So I cut out the pages that I liked and went to second-hand stores and markets of stolen things.
I would ask my parents for money for going out, but I didn’t go out – instead, on Sunday morning, I’d go to the market, and shop. Even at this young age, I was merchandising.
If you are a company with a lot of money, then you can invest a lot of money. But if you’re a smaller company then you have to understand exactly who is your customer. I think even if you have a beautiful product, it will only get you there 70%. But if you have good merchandising, and good visuals, that will get you to 100%.
People can understand beautiful things, but they can’t always make their own wardrobe, so you have to put things together in the right way.
SM: You’re not a ‘traditional’ CEO…
LS: I am unusual as a CEO. The responsibility is signing the profit and loss, but I don’t come from a top-tier consulting firm or financial background, which I honestly found quite boring.
I come from a product and merchandising background. To me, if you are unable to understand a product – regardless if it’s beautiful or not – how can you bring success to a company whose core business is that product?
For more information, see palzileri.com
