George Clooney wears a two-button suit by Ermenegildo Zegna in The American, and the reason it registers is that almost nothing else in the film does. Anton Corbijn’s picture, released on 1 September 2010 and adapted by Rowan Joffé from Martin Booth’s 1990 novel A Very Private Gentleman, casts Clooney as a contract killer hiding in Italy. He has few lines, fewer possessions and one good suit.
Luxos noted at the time that the scenes with Violante Placido were shot in Castel del Monte, in Abruzzo. The film worked through the Province of L’Aquila – Castel del Monte, Sulmona, Castelvecchio Calvisio, Calascio and Campo Imperatore – and in Rome. That is stone-coloured country, and it is unkind to tailoring that tries too hard.
The suit is from a house that comes from the same kind of landscape. Zegna was founded in 1910 by Ermenegildo Zegna at Trivero, in Biella, in Piedmont, where the wool mill still is. In 1993 the company created the Oasi Zegna, 100 square kilometres of the Biellese Alps around a plantation of more than 500,000 conifers put in during the late 1930s.
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Zegna launched its made-to-measure service, Su Misura, in 1972, and that is the register the film is working in: a suit cut for one man, worn until it looks like his own skin, and never mentioned. The Zegna Group went public in New York on 20 December 2021 at a valuation of $3.1 billion, the first Italian fashion company listed there.
If you want the effect, the film is a better brief than any lookbook. One two-button jacket in a flat mid-grey, no pattern and no contrast, worn with the same two shirts for the whole picture. A wardrobe that small survives on the cut alone. That is the argument for su misura, made without a word of copy.