Thursday, September 21, 2017

We Tag Along With Santoni’s Marco Zanini on His Summer Trip to Japan


Marco Zanini loves to travel. “As much as I long for a lazy holiday at the end of a year of exhausting work, when it’s time to plan, I get restless. I know that if I don’t feed my curiosity—moving around, exploring something new—I’ll be bored stiff after a couple of days and my mood will become intolerable!” says the creative director of Santoni. Zanini presents his second collection for the label in Milan today. After almost a year of careful, patient research, he and his boyfriend, Giuseppe, came up with a summer itinerary far-flung enough to satiate the curiosity that feeds his creative work.

The pair left for Japan at the beginning of August, avoiding the well-trod tourist route and focusing instead on a remote area north of Tokyo. “There were no Westerners, [at least] we didn’t meet any,” says the designer, who is half Italian, half Swedish. Yamagata Prefecture is four hours by bullet train from the hyperbolic urgency of Tokyo, but Zanini and Giuseppe felt worlds away. “It was really as if the time had stopped,” remembers Zanini.

Why this fascination for the Japanese countryside? “I longed for something as far away as possible from our hectic lifestyle, both mentally and physically,” he says. “I adore Japan and love everything about its lifestyle: the calmness; the humble yet hyper-sophisticated aesthetic; the art of careful, impeccable presentation. Also, being the son of a Swedish mother, I find a lot of similarities between these two cultures. They feel to me as if they were like cousins, with the same shared aesthetic values and idiosyncrasies. There’s a love for simplicity, even for severity, both in Japan and in Sweden. So, to me, Japan feels utterly exotic but also very familiar.”

Here, Zanini shares his scrapbook with Vogue.

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