THE RETURN OF THE BALMACAAN COAT

This season is marked by the return of the Balmacaan Coat. The peacocks of the Pitti already showed them to us.

A balmacaan is a "loose, full overcoat with raglan sleeves, originally made of rough woolen cloth."

It is named after an estate near Inverness, Scotland, and is a single-breasted coat, often a raincoat. To decrease risk of water penetrating the coat, the number of seams is reduced by bringing the sleeve to the collar (raglan sleeves) rather than to the shoulder as usual. Since it was designed to keep the rain and wind out, the collar can be buttoned all the way up to the neck, and is usually made of tweed or gabardine.

LARDINI - FALL/WINTER 2017 LOOKBOOK

Armed with little else but a passion for style and elegance, Luigi Lardini started out in the Seventies at the tender age of eighteen by creating a menswear collection. Intuitively sensing the potential behind his choices, his brother Andrea, then 21, and his sister Lorena, 19, joined forces with him whilst their father provided the financial backing for their start-up process. In 1978, a tailoring workshop was opened which soon aroused the attention of some fashion greats. Within a few years, the list of customers who enlisted Lardini’s services to make garments for them had grown and included some distinguished international names. Business burgeoned and the Lardinis took on different roles, acting in different yet complementary capacities to foster corporate development: Luigi handled the style issues, Andrea, with his university degree in computer engineering, took care of the technological side of matters whilst Lorena took on the responsibility for administration and financial management. A few years later, their younger sister Annarita also joined the family company assuming the position of quality control on all the garments leaving the company plants.

Fired by their business success and prompted by a desire to expand into new directions, in time the Lardini family resolutely took on a new endeavour and sought to forge a collection in their own name.

So it was that in 1993 the first Lardini menswear collection emerged from their workshops.