Mr Alessandro Sartori, creative director of Ermenegildo Zegna, knows the power of close contact. “Really, it’s something you have to feel to experience,” he says of a particular fabric that his sizeable research and development team have been working on, a sort of technical knitwear. We’re speaking over a crackly Zoom, so the feel of Ermenegildo Zegna’s exceptional fabrication will have to wait for the time being, but there are comprehensive plans afoot for such a future.

“There’s an appetite for newness now, which I find exciting,” says the softly spoken 55-year old from his headquarters in Milan. Sartori has always been something of a clairvoyant about the way men will want to dress. Since he took over in 2016, his mission statement has been to make tailoring relevant and modern. It just so happens that the small matter of a global pandemic underlined the point that Sartori had been labouring all these years.

“It’s strange, because we were already working with different silhouettes, different DNA strands and codes and so, for us, it’s already a natural progression,” he says of the subtle manipulation he’s applied to Ermenegildo Zegna’s suiting in recent years. Forming halfway hybrids between single and double-breasted, softening the stance and creating shirts, jackets and trousers in surprising fabric blends – cashmere and cotton jersey, for example – are part of his sartorial alchemy.

“The fabric is more fluid,” he says. “There are new materials and shapes. We’ve created this fuller cut of trousers that are roomier. There’s still that tailoring influence, but I think now tailoring can mean so much more than what has gone before.”

It’s particularly striking given this is the brand that is a byword for upright, classical Italian sartorialism. Founded by Mr Ermenegildo Zegna in 1910 in Trivero, northern Italy, it became known for its peerless excellence in fabrication, cemented by the founding of a sprawling factory in its hometown cradled in the tree-dotted foothills of the Italian Alps, which has slowly evolved into a conservation project, Oasi Zegna, now spearheaded by the founder’s granddaughter, Ms Anna Zegna.

Sartori starts with the materials themselves, rather than outside influence and far-flung cultural cherry picking, for example. And the factory is where the touch paper is lit. It’s where his curiosity – how to make a shirt in leather with the lightness of paper – becomes reality.

“We can really create anything,” he says of the skill and ability of the craftsmanship of Trivero. “We can look at things with a fresh take. What we think of as luxury materials is changing, and we’ve developed things such as cashmere jersey, woven fabrics as outerwear and using technical fabrics in tailoring.”

Another part of what makes Trivero so spellbinding, apart from the mist that rolls across the undulating landscape and wends its way around the factory’s early 20th-century chimneys, is its long-standing focus on the local ecology, long before going green was a buzz phrase.

“Ermenegildo was passionate about preserving what we have here, replacing any trees that were felled, using rainwater and planting forests,” says Sartori. The nature reserve now covers 100sq km and is filled with lush vegetation, ski resorts and hamlets. In the factory, dyes are made using vegetables and wild flowers instead of chemicals.

It’s an approach that parlays directly into the clothes. Sartori reveals that the brand’s bestselling sneaker is now made using recycled wool. The Use The Existing range launched in 2019 to combat waste.

How does that translate to the way men are dressing now? “I believe our clients are asking for a new image, a new style, a new mood,” says Sartori. “For me, right now, the most exciting innovations are happening in knitwear and how we wear it. For example, you can wear a suit, but it’s no longer about wearing it with a classic shirt and tie. You might wear a crew neck or a rollneck. You might wear a parka on top, or wear it with a leisure shoe.”

Sartori notes that the bestselling jacket recently has been a cashmere and corduroy hybrid, a world away from the upright, solidly structured varieties you’d expect in more patrician wardrobes. “It’s about progressing how we think of our clothes and where they fit in our lives,” he says. “How we live has changed and our wardrobes need to reflect that.”

And no one has done that so thoroughly, or so deftly, as he.