Before debuting his unabashedly macho first couture collection for Brioni in Paris yesterday, newly installed creative director Justin O’Shea revealed his first, equally hard-edged campaign. In an unexpected move for the classic Italian menswear house (perhaps not so much for O’Shea himself, the tattooed former Fashion Director of MyTheresa who doesn’t have any design training), the campaign stars legendary metal outfit Metallica.
According to The Business of Fashion, which first revealed the images, the black and white campaign is a reference to Queen’s Bohemian Rhapsody album cover, and incorporates a gothic typeface that’s a play on the brand’s first official logo, which was used from the mid 1950s to the 80s. Metallica’s four members sport, “a new Brioni suit style called the Continental, which features wider shoulders, a narrow waist, a longer body and a more structured silhouette,” reports BoF, contrasting the style to “the slim-cut suits of, say, Saint Laurent.”
It’s an interesting comparison, as what’s being heralded as Brioni’s “radical, masculine repositioning” seems to follow a logic similar to the visual identity Hedi Slimane carved during his tenure at Saint Laurent. Slimane scouted many of his runway models at DIY punk gigs. But alongside these emerging talents, he often recruited musical legends (many of whom, like Metallica, hail from LA) including Marilyn Manson, Courtney Love, Kim Gordon, Joni Mitchell, and Beach Boy Brian Wilson to star in his own black and white portrait campaigns.
It had a spectacular effect on sales; in just three years, Slimane more than doubled the house’s annual revenue. “The rise of our business with Hedi Slimane’s Saint Laurent can only be described as meteoric,” O’Shea, then MyTheresa’s buying director, told BoF in 2015. As he constructs a rebellious new identity for Brioni, it’ll be interesting to see what lessons O’Shea might glean from Slimane’s success. Either way, we vote Black Sabbath next.
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Text Emily Manning