Zegna staged its Spring/Summer 2027 show on Malibu Pier on 5 June, under the title La Villeggiatura, named for the Italian custom of decamping the whole household to a single place for a long, unhurried summer. Roughly 500 guests gathered on the pier, first built in 1905, to watch creative director Alessandro Sartori’s collection unfold against the Pacific, with surfers visible in the waves below.
The pier itself had been transformed into the image of a 1960s and ’70s Italian seaside resort, lined with striped parasols and finished with cocktails on arrival. Sartori described the season’s silhouette as “dégagé,” building the collection around just-oversized tailoring in seersucker and bold stripes, paired with roomier smock shirting cut with deep V-necklines and fastened across the chest with metal clasps. The pieces, rendered in silk, leather, and crocodile, moved alongside tailored shorts, safari-style parkas, and knitwear that nodded to the 1960s and ’70s. The collection’s closing act introduced its boldest colour move yet — a run of vivid aqua, orange, and green.
For Sartori, the season was an exercise in distilling Zegna’s idea of ease. He has described wanting the collection to carry a discerning, distinctly Italian attitude toward leisure dressing, with every piece built outward from the texture and pattern of its fabric — small shifts in a single thread reworked into something that feels continuously renewed.
The choice of Malibu extends a pattern Zegna has followed at its recent shows in Milan, Dubai, and beyond, where the house’s own clients sit at the centre of the evening rather than at its edges. Around 120 clients, roughly half of them American, were flown in for the show before moving on to a takeover of the Chateau Marmont, where Villa Zegna — a temporary members’ space modelled on a 1970s Italian villa — let them place made-to-measure orders directly from the collection, including pieces cut in vicuña and ultra-fine cashmere. The concept has now travelled through Shanghai, New York, Dubai, Miami, and Milan before landing in Los Angeles.
The location is not incidental. Zegna, founded as a wool mill in the Piedmont town of Trivero in 1910, still spins its own cloth using techniques largely unchanged from the house’s early decades, even as it sources raw materials from as far afield as Mongolia for cashmere and Normandy for linen. Los Angeles now ranks as the brand’s second-largest market after New York, which is the commercial logic behind moving an entire runway production onto a California pier rather than restaging the show closer to home.
Zegna’s Malibu show also arrived amid a broader migration of major European houses toward Los Angeles this season. Hermès staged the second chapter of its Autumn/Winter 2026 womenswear collection in Bel Air the night before, while Dior brought its first Jonathan Anderson–helmed Cruise show to the Los Angeles County Museum of Art the previous month. Read alongside Gucci and Louis Vuitton’s Cruise presentations in New York in May, the pattern points to a wider effort among luxury houses to court the American market on its own ground, rather than waiting for it to arrive in Europe.
The Spring/Summer 2027 collection is due in stores in 2027. By then, Malibu Pier’s turn as an Italian beach club may read as one data point in a larger shift — houses increasingly building their calendars around where their clients already are, rather than where fashion has traditionally asked them to travel. Visit Zegna here.
