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Los Angeles Times
19-07-2025
- Los Angeles Times
The passion and wild herbs of a Tuscan chef
A meal in Tuscany's Valdichiana. Plus, L.A.'s best new Armenian restaurant. Avner Levi's cherry-topped hamachi crudo. The chicken Caesar wrap comeback. And the best wedding gifts for restaurant lovers. I'm Laurie Ochoa, general manager of L.A. Times Food, with this week's Tasting Notes. Most of the time we travel to escape our everyday lives, to experience something new. But sometimes we travel to return to something familiar. I've been returning to the same part of Italy, an Umbrian town where it's easy to slip across the A1 into Tuscany, for more than 20 years. For many of those years I've made my way to Osteria La Vecchia Rota in Marciano della Chiana, a small fortress town between Arezzo and Siena. Two things bring me back. Certainly, there is the food, intensely local pastas and roasted meats you are unlikely to find in any of the thousands of Italian restaurants that exist in the U.S. And then there is the proprietor, Massimo Giavannini, who appears before you in a burgundy-red chef's apron and matching chef's hat that, in contrast to the stiff toques favored by classically trained French chefs, flops jauntily to the side — a sign of friendliness and approachability. You can order from a printed menu, but most of the time, if he is not handling a rush of orders in the kitchen, Giavannini — who has called himself 'the innkeeper with a passion for organic produce' — prefers to describe the dishes for you in his distinctive raspy voice. These are the moments you realize you have found yourself in the hands of a passionate cook, one who wants you to understand what is special about the ingredients that will go into your food. 'You know pesto,' he said on one visit, 'but our grandmother and grandfather made another pesto. We make it with selvatica mint [or wild mint], good garlic, good oil, pine nuts and walnuts.' He explains that the portulaca, or purslane, which sauces his tortelli, is critical to the region in summer — for people and for animals — 'because inside the leaf it's like water ... it's important for energy, to cool off.' Of the black truffle-topped ricotta gnudi I always order, he says, 'Ours are green because they are made with ... ' He struggles with the English word and then smiles big when I ask, 'nettles?' 'Yes!' he says. We have done this information exchange before and I love it every time. Often, I'll learn something new, but mostly I like being in his now-familiar presence. Of course, it was my late husband and this paper's previous restaurant critic, Jonathan Gold, who first brought me and our kids — and then our friends — to La Vecchia Rota thanks to his obsession with trying as many places in the guidebook Osterie d'Italia, put out by Italy's Slow Food organization. I didn't see it in this year's guide, but at one point La Vecchia Rota — specializing, as its website says, in 'the now-forgotten cuisine of the Valdichiana' — was awarded a 'snail,' the guide's highest ranking for restaurants that epitomize Slow Food's cook-local ethos. Last month, a big group of us gathered in the piazza outside the restaurant, where tables are set out in the summer for al fresco dinners. Plates of our favorite pastas were passed around, including one of hand-cut squares of dough sauced with pears and Pecorino cheese and another made with Tuscany's big-bulbed garlic known as aglione di Valdichiana, then platters of chicken 'made the way it used to be,' roast pork, onions cooked in the ashes of the wood-fired oven and some of the best potatoes I've ever eaten. We may have been a group of outsiders with no actual roots in this land, but after being fed here by Giavannini year after year, this corner of Tuscany has started to feel a bit like home. Ever since I shared a meal with critic Bill Addison early in his research for this week's review of Tun Lahmajo in Burbank, I haven't stopped craving the Armenian restaurant's many meaty and cheesy breads, stews and roasted potatoes hand-mashed at the table. Since then, I've tried to get other people to come try what Addison calls 'L.A.'s best new Armenian restaurant' — in part because Tun Lahmajo serves dishes that go beyond the classic repertoire of charcoal-grilled meats and sides we've come to love in Southern California. I wasn't always successful. Maybe now, with Addison's official blessing on the place, I can persuade my friends to come along. 'A trio of friends — all from L.A.'s Armenian community, and all high school dropouts — scraped together $900 in 2017 because they believed that their Nashville-style fried chicken stand was the future,' writes Food's reporter Stephanie Breijo. 'Now Dave's Hot Chicken is worth $1 billion.' Breijo describes how Arman Oganesyan, Tommy Rubenyan and Dave Kopushyan (a former line cook at Thomas Keller's now-closed Bouchon Bistro in Beverly Hills) went from an unpermitted pop-up in an East Hollywood parking lot to the central figures in 'one of L.A.'s most astounding small-business success stories' after being acquired in June by private equity firm Roark Capital. It's a classic L.A. story — one more national fast-food chain born in Southern California. Of course, Dave's is not the L.A. restaurant that popularized hot chicken in Southern California. That would be Howlin' Ray's started in 2015 by Johnny Ray Zone. He gives full credit to the Black cooks of Nashville, who started bringing the fire to fried chicken, especially the family behind Prince's Hot Chicken, started in the 1930s by Thornton Prince after an angry lover tried to get her revenge on the philandering entrepreneur with an overdose of spice on his fried chicken. (The name of the woman who made that first fuming batch seems to have been lost to history.) Angelenos have access to the Prince legacy through Kim Prince, who partnered with Dulan's on Crenshaw owner Greg Dulan to start the Dulanville Food Truck. Back in 2020, columnist Jenn Harris made hot fried chicken with Prince and Zone for her Bucket List video series. It still makes good watching. Cento Raw Bar has become one of L.A.'s hottest new restaurants of 2025. Its chef, Avner Levi, came to the Times Test Kitchen recently for our 'Chef That!' video series to show us how he makes hamachi crudo, fresh jalapeños and an unusual but delicious addition of sweet cherries. Watch Levi break down half of a hamachi into two filets and then transform the fish into a perfect summer appetizer in this video. Then try the recipe for yourself. It's a wonderful summer dish. Reporter Lauren Ng talked with Shibumi chef-owner David Schlosser about his decision to close the Kappo omakase-style restaurant on Saturday. 'In the end of 2023 to 2024, things really flattened out,' he said. 'The staff is the same, the recipes were the same. The only thing that wasn't the same was people just weren't coming in.' And in another loss for downtown L.A., Verve Coffee Roasters has closed its Spring Street location, the first shop it opened in Southern California. 'Like many businesses in downtown L.A., we saw lasting changes in foot traffic patterns that deeply affected day-to-day operations,' a Verve spokesperson told Ng in an email. 'The level of consistent foot traffic simply didn't support what is needed to sustain the cafe in a high-overhead environment like downtown.' Its other L.A. locations remain open. Chef Michael Mina's Mother Tongue in Hollywood has also closed, and Cabra, the Peruvian-inspired restaurant from Girl & the Goat chef Stephanie Izard at downtown L.A.'s Hoxton hotel is closing on July 31.
Sydney Morning Herald
11-07-2025
- Health
- Sydney Morning Herald
After my chronic illness diagnosis, I was deluged with promises of a cure
I see myself there: an ancient site of healing, a soft Mediterranean breeze, an impossibly painless life, a cure. For some years now, I have read about a place called Cancelli, in the Umbrian hills of central Italy. My rational mind knows that a miracle cure is not possible for the disease that I have, but that does not stop the storytelling drive, which is perhaps also the drive of hope, from thinking otherwise. For centuries, the town of Cancelli has been a site of pilgrimage. Those suffering various physical ailments, particularly arthritis and sciatica, have visited a man named Cancelli – a sort of priest, artist, teacher, business owner – to be healed. Before this, pilgrims visited his family members. As the story goes, the healing gift was bestowed on the family by the apostles Peter and Paul, and later, an ancestor healed the Pope. I have never been to this town but I have thought about it often. To see ourselves as a different, hypothetical person, if only we could take ourselves out of our present lives and reach a faraway location, is not an unusual phenomenon. Seeking a cure as a chronically ill person sometimes feels similarly like pursuing a distant, better self. What is it about such sites of healing, and the act of the pilgrimage, that still holds such power? What is it about the narrative of a cure that causes us to doggedly pursue it at all costs? When my left knee began to ache and swell when I was 21, and the headaches I'd had since I was 16 —which traversed my neck up over my right ear, temple and eye—began to worsen and materialise weekly, I turned to both conventional and what might be called 'alternative' therapies. For the ill person, naming can bring wild relief, grief in the face of both new and lost identities, and crucial medical acceptance as a gateway to treatment. When I was 23, I was given such names in the diagnosis of two overlapping autoimmune diseases – rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis – following surgery on my bad knee, a procedure that aggravated the inflamed joint yet brought about the final diagnoses. This naming felt like a life sentence and precipitated years of denial: I did not need the strong immune-suppressant drugs, I would fix this on my own, I would find 'natural' ways to heal, it would not be forever. I rarely used the word 'arthritis', even when strangers asked why I limped or what was wrong with my knee, perhaps partly because of my resistance to the meaning of the name, as I ardently committed to so-called 'complementary' therapies, dietary cures and the stubborn refusal to ingest the immunosuppressant drugs prescribed by a specialist doctor. Now I ask myself: What inspired the refusal of the diagnosis and the prescription to treat it? What drive was being enacted by the turn to complementary therapies? I was both wary of and reassured by the internet – perhaps I still am. It is easy to scoff at the targeted advertisements delivered by the algorithm and less so the personal narratives – often termed 'anecdotal evidence' – that proliferate. It was comforting to read forums and blog posts written by those in a similar position. Their journeys of trying diets, supplements and complementary therapies offered granules of possibility. Possibility as hope. Possibility as a sense of control over chaos. This is not a story of wildly unbelievable cures pursued without common sense. It is not a narrative of following or preaching a medical hoax, although we know those exist, too. There is, rather, a very human, very common story of a need to have some control over one's body, life, illness, to have hope. To be told there was nothing to be done except take the medication was not something my younger mind could accept. I am struck by the similarities between the ancient pilgrimage and the modern internet follower, both overwhelmed by the story of their illness, both seeking to rein it in by following a specific path. A diagnosis of chronic illness, incurable, particularly in a younger person, has an unbelievable quality. You have 60, 70, even 80 years of life ahead of you – a formless expanse of time that it is difficult to overlay with the new reality of chronic disease and disability. The parallels between religious faith and faith in healing are apparent. I see this in how such faiths are often embodied in a person—the online followers as our modern-day disciples. I see this in the language we use and which blurs the divine and the scientific—the 'miracle drug'. I am now a beneficiary of one of those miracle drugs, in a family of immunosuppressant treatments called TNF blockers and JAK inhibitors. They can save a person with arthritis from severe joint damage and lifelong pain. What is perhaps an even greater miracle is I pay a small fraction of the true cost of this medication thanks to our state-subsidised medication scheme, the PBS. The American writer Meghan O'Rourke, in her book The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, considers the turn to the 'natural' approach of treating illness, or a turn away from medicine as a sign that we are 'in thrall to one of the most powerful contemporary Western delusions: namely, the idea that we can control the outcomes of our lives, in this case through self-purification'. We see such narratives performed online in the so-called 'wellness' world. If we just follow this particular lifestyle, diet, supplement and exercise regimen, we'll feel renewed, cured. This is a particularly fraught terrain for the chronically ill person. We know that these prescriptions for life are not really 'real', but they comfort us. The more I write, the more I see narrative as a need for control – for good or ill. The cults of self-improvement and self-purification are powerful and create a strange internal battle in which the person with an illness thinks: what have I done, what have I not done? There are echoes of divine retribution. I stubbornly resisted medication in my 20s perhaps because I wanted to believe I could undo the wrong, take control over it. The results were catastrophic: severe joint damage, joint replacement surgery. It would be easy to look at this past self and shake my head, what an idiot, in the same way we might view anti-science healers, proponents of snake-oil cures. But throughout my ruminations on this past self – and I think of her a lot – and in my novels about the experience of illness, it seems that compassion is a more productive feeling than anger or regret. Pain is incredibly singular. In its throes, you feel as though nobody else could understand. The positive psychological impacts of the pilgrimage are very much real. A study of pilgrims to Lourdes in France, and another to Hindu pilgrimage sites, shows that pilgrims self-report improved quality of life or a greater sense of well-being upon their return. The authors of a study of such pilgrimages point to ideas of 'shared identity' and 'relationality and collective self-realisation'. This is thought to be something of a 'social cure'. And though I have said that the online world is a fraught location for the ill, there are genuine places of a healing kind to be found. For me, this was in a blog post, written by a young woman in New York, living with a similar chronic illness to mine. I read her descriptions of her life as a young person with a chronic illness and saw myself. This mirroring of experience changed my conception of my illness. I wrote to her to thank her for such writing, and her reply precipitated one of my closest friendships to this day. I am perhaps too stubborn and resistant to closed narratives to say that I had 'acceptance' as a result of this friendship, but her online and physical presence in my life (I've visited her several times over the past 15 years and been welcomed like family) has indeed been something of a social cure for an incurable disease. Loading While my body cannot cope without the life-altering medications that are available to me, and which I now gladly administer as a weekly injection, my mind, my sense of self, likewise cannot easily persist without some kind of representation of this experience. Pain is incredibly singular. In its throes, you feel as though nobody else could understand. I have come to understand that the surgeon and other specialists I see are not treating my experience of pain but the pain itself. They address the disease. The essence of the illness – what it is like to be me in this body – is separate from the discourse we have in the consultation room. The narrative of the illness, including the need for a cure of some form, is what the patient deals with when they leave the doctor's rooms. The word 'cure', after all, comes from curare, to take care of—not necessarily to fix. That is perhaps why I continue to see the town of Cancelli in my mind, and I think about going there one day.
The Age
11-07-2025
- Health
- The Age
After my chronic illness diagnosis, I was deluged with promises of a cure
I see myself there: an ancient site of healing, a soft Mediterranean breeze, an impossibly painless life, a cure. For some years now, I have read about a place called Cancelli, in the Umbrian hills of central Italy. My rational mind knows that a miracle cure is not possible for the disease that I have, but that does not stop the storytelling drive, which is perhaps also the drive of hope, from thinking otherwise. For centuries, the town of Cancelli has been a site of pilgrimage. Those suffering various physical ailments, particularly arthritis and sciatica, have visited a man named Cancelli – a sort of priest, artist, teacher, business owner – to be healed. Before this, pilgrims visited his family members. As the story goes, the healing gift was bestowed on the family by the apostles Peter and Paul, and later, an ancestor healed the Pope. I have never been to this town but I have thought about it often. To see ourselves as a different, hypothetical person, if only we could take ourselves out of our present lives and reach a faraway location, is not an unusual phenomenon. Seeking a cure as a chronically ill person sometimes feels similarly like pursuing a distant, better self. What is it about such sites of healing, and the act of the pilgrimage, that still holds such power? What is it about the narrative of a cure that causes us to doggedly pursue it at all costs? When my left knee began to ache and swell when I was 21, and the headaches I'd had since I was 16 —which traversed my neck up over my right ear, temple and eye—began to worsen and materialise weekly, I turned to both conventional and what might be called 'alternative' therapies. For the ill person, naming can bring wild relief, grief in the face of both new and lost identities, and crucial medical acceptance as a gateway to treatment. When I was 23, I was given such names in the diagnosis of two overlapping autoimmune diseases – rheumatoid arthritis and ankylosing spondylitis – following surgery on my bad knee, a procedure that aggravated the inflamed joint yet brought about the final diagnoses. This naming felt like a life sentence and precipitated years of denial: I did not need the strong immune-suppressant drugs, I would fix this on my own, I would find 'natural' ways to heal, it would not be forever. I rarely used the word 'arthritis', even when strangers asked why I limped or what was wrong with my knee, perhaps partly because of my resistance to the meaning of the name, as I ardently committed to so-called 'complementary' therapies, dietary cures and the stubborn refusal to ingest the immunosuppressant drugs prescribed by a specialist doctor. Now I ask myself: What inspired the refusal of the diagnosis and the prescription to treat it? What drive was being enacted by the turn to complementary therapies? I was both wary of and reassured by the internet – perhaps I still am. It is easy to scoff at the targeted advertisements delivered by the algorithm and less so the personal narratives – often termed 'anecdotal evidence' – that proliferate. It was comforting to read forums and blog posts written by those in a similar position. Their journeys of trying diets, supplements and complementary therapies offered granules of possibility. Possibility as hope. Possibility as a sense of control over chaos. This is not a story of wildly unbelievable cures pursued without common sense. It is not a narrative of following or preaching a medical hoax, although we know those exist, too. There is, rather, a very human, very common story of a need to have some control over one's body, life, illness, to have hope. To be told there was nothing to be done except take the medication was not something my younger mind could accept. I am struck by the similarities between the ancient pilgrimage and the modern internet follower, both overwhelmed by the story of their illness, both seeking to rein it in by following a specific path. A diagnosis of chronic illness, incurable, particularly in a younger person, has an unbelievable quality. You have 60, 70, even 80 years of life ahead of you – a formless expanse of time that it is difficult to overlay with the new reality of chronic disease and disability. The parallels between religious faith and faith in healing are apparent. I see this in how such faiths are often embodied in a person—the online followers as our modern-day disciples. I see this in the language we use and which blurs the divine and the scientific—the 'miracle drug'. I am now a beneficiary of one of those miracle drugs, in a family of immunosuppressant treatments called TNF blockers and JAK inhibitors. They can save a person with arthritis from severe joint damage and lifelong pain. What is perhaps an even greater miracle is I pay a small fraction of the true cost of this medication thanks to our state-subsidised medication scheme, the PBS. The American writer Meghan O'Rourke, in her book The Invisible Kingdom: Reimagining Chronic Illness, considers the turn to the 'natural' approach of treating illness, or a turn away from medicine as a sign that we are 'in thrall to one of the most powerful contemporary Western delusions: namely, the idea that we can control the outcomes of our lives, in this case through self-purification'. We see such narratives performed online in the so-called 'wellness' world. If we just follow this particular lifestyle, diet, supplement and exercise regimen, we'll feel renewed, cured. This is a particularly fraught terrain for the chronically ill person. We know that these prescriptions for life are not really 'real', but they comfort us. The more I write, the more I see narrative as a need for control – for good or ill. The cults of self-improvement and self-purification are powerful and create a strange internal battle in which the person with an illness thinks: what have I done, what have I not done? There are echoes of divine retribution. I stubbornly resisted medication in my 20s perhaps because I wanted to believe I could undo the wrong, take control over it. The results were catastrophic: severe joint damage, joint replacement surgery. It would be easy to look at this past self and shake my head, what an idiot, in the same way we might view anti-science healers, proponents of snake-oil cures. But throughout my ruminations on this past self – and I think of her a lot – and in my novels about the experience of illness, it seems that compassion is a more productive feeling than anger or regret. Pain is incredibly singular. In its throes, you feel as though nobody else could understand. The positive psychological impacts of the pilgrimage are very much real. A study of pilgrims to Lourdes in France, and another to Hindu pilgrimage sites, shows that pilgrims self-report improved quality of life or a greater sense of well-being upon their return. The authors of a study of such pilgrimages point to ideas of 'shared identity' and 'relationality and collective self-realisation'. This is thought to be something of a 'social cure'. And though I have said that the online world is a fraught location for the ill, there are genuine places of a healing kind to be found. For me, this was in a blog post, written by a young woman in New York, living with a similar chronic illness to mine. I read her descriptions of her life as a young person with a chronic illness and saw myself. This mirroring of experience changed my conception of my illness. I wrote to her to thank her for such writing, and her reply precipitated one of my closest friendships to this day. I am perhaps too stubborn and resistant to closed narratives to say that I had 'acceptance' as a result of this friendship, but her online and physical presence in my life (I've visited her several times over the past 15 years and been welcomed like family) has indeed been something of a social cure for an incurable disease. Loading While my body cannot cope without the life-altering medications that are available to me, and which I now gladly administer as a weekly injection, my mind, my sense of self, likewise cannot easily persist without some kind of representation of this experience. Pain is incredibly singular. In its throes, you feel as though nobody else could understand. I have come to understand that the surgeon and other specialists I see are not treating my experience of pain but the pain itself. They address the disease. The essence of the illness – what it is like to be me in this body – is separate from the discourse we have in the consultation room. The narrative of the illness, including the need for a cure of some form, is what the patient deals with when they leave the doctor's rooms. The word 'cure', after all, comes from curare, to take care of—not necessarily to fix. That is perhaps why I continue to see the town of Cancelli in my mind, and I think about going there one day.
Wall Street Journal
05-06-2025
- Business
- Wall Street Journal
Tariffs and Conglomerates Are Chasing Them. Italy's Biggest Fashion Families Are Unfazed.
One morning this spring, Brunello Cucinelli whistled as he strode from a cafe he'd just finished refurbishing to the 14th-century castle that houses one of the 130 stores in his luxury sportswear empire. From the top of the hill that crowns Solomeo, the Umbrian hamlet where he's lived and worked for four decades, nearly everything in view had been touched by Cucinelli in one way or another: low-lying modern factory buildings home to his operation, but also a theater, a soccer field and production facilities for both wine and olive oil. An agrarian park, open to the handful of villagers who don't work for the company (1,500 are Cucinelli employees), contains Cucinelli's travertine Tribute to Human Dignity. 'Every human being,' Cucinelli said, 'is supposed to live where they were born.' This is why, even as he built his eponymous brand from a collection of a few dozen sweaters to a swaggering empire heavy on the casually luxe Italian style philosophy known as sprezzatura, Cucinelli remained here in Solomeo, where he's lived since 1985, and where his wife, Federica, was born. His daughters, Carolina and Camilla, were born here, too, and now live in town with their spouses ('the husbands,' Carolina calls them). All four work for the company.
Euronews
01-06-2025
- Euronews
Fashion designer Brunello Cucinelli gets doctorate in architecture
'When we build, let us think that we build forever,' Italian fashion designer Brunello Cucinelli quoted English polymath John Ruskin at an address to celebrate being the first recipient of an honorary doctorate in 'Design for Made in Italy: Identity, Innovation, and Sustainability'. The same quote is inscribed on a plaque in the centre of Solomeo, the hamlet which Cucinelli has made the home of his family, business and spiritual life since 1985. Once a crumbling site at the top of a hill among the rolling Umbrian countryside, it has been lovingly restored over the years thanks to funds from the Cucinelli enterprise. It is for this that he's been honoured at the University of Campania by a group of universities and specialists in the field of architecture, as well as the extension of this work to the surrounding Umbrian region. It is the first time the designer has received an award for architecture. In 2010 the designer, famed for his luxurious cashmere knitwear, and his wife, established Fondazione Brunello e Federica Cucinelli which has had a significant and lasting impact on the Umbrian region. The Italian region is characterised by medieval towns, monasteries and lush green fields and hills which make it a popular holiday and wedding destination, but the countless historic sites present a challenge to maintain. 'I firmly believe in the duty to preserve this legacy,' says Cucinelli. 'In losing our memories, we would lose ourselves. Moreover, safeguarding history means giving substance to the future.' Walking around Perugia, the region's capital, you won't find the Cucinelli name celebrated on a plaque or in the name of a building, but the family's influence is everywhere. It's in the pink tones of the Roman inscription on the city's Etruscan arch landmark, which hadn't been visible to present-day visitors until the Cucinelli Foundation restored it in 2014. It's in the beautifully refurbished interiors of the Morlacchi theatre, which has remained open to residents thanks to funding given in 2017 and the fresh façade of the cathedral they supported in 2022. In 2018, Brunello Cucinelli sold a 6% share in his eponymous company to add a further €100 million to the foundation. The foundation's current ongoing projects include a library in Solomeo and the rebuilding of the medieval village of Castelluccio di Norcia which was destroyed in an earthquake in 2016. Many of Italy's fashion houses have contributed to the restoration of the country's historic landmarks. Fendi donated €2 million to the restoration of the Trevi Fountain in 2013, Salvatore Ferragamo renovated a wing of the Uffizi Gallery in 2015 and Bulgari sponsored work on the Spanish Steps in 2016. While these projects are necessary and worthwhile, there's something particularly special about Cucinelli's ongoing work on a local level in the region he clearly loves so deeply. The projects also go beyond preserving history, with many having tangible benefits for the wider community too. Culture, education and spirituality are at the heart of many of them. 'I have learned that architecture is made for mankind,' he explains. Brunello Cucinelli was born in the rural Umbrian village of Castel Rigone, around 20km from Solomeo. He met his wife, Federica, in her hometown of Solomeo when they were teenagers and the couple set up home in the hamlet which today is home to around 700 other residents. It's also now home to their two daughters, Camilla and Carolina, along with their husbands, all of whom work in the company, and their children. Down in the valley next to the hamlet is the Brunello Cucinelli factory and offices which provide work to around 700 employees. The space is bright and clean, with large windows that look out onto the manicured lawns and surrounding countryside, a luxury many fashion workers don't get in city warehouses. Lunch breaks are an hour and a half, no one eats at their desk, and everyone leaves on time at the end of the day. 'That time is for your soul,' says the entrepreneur. Even among his own family, they don't talk business at the dinner table. Cucinelli has a reputation as 'fashion's philosopher', and his speech at the University of Campania Luigi Vanvitelli was littered with the thoughts and words of great thinkers: Kant, St Francis, St Benedict, Xenophanes, Emperor Hadrian and many more. He's driven by his own philosophy of 'humanistic capitalism'. Unlike many capitalists though, he thinks far into the future. The old workshops of the company in Solomeo are kept in a way that they could be returned into residential apartments should the company no longer need them. The spaces are currently being used, however, to train future generations of artisans. 'I'm not concerned about who will buy luxury in the future, I'm concerned about who will make it,' Cucinelli says. The School of Contemporary High Craftsmanship and Arts opened in 2013 offers programmes which directly support the company's outputs, such as pattern cutting, tailoring and mending, but also horticulture, gardening and masonry, skills which he believes need preserving for the wider world. Since Brunello Cucinelli went public in 2012, its market capitalisation has grown from €530 million to €6.5 billion, a dream come true for any entrepreneur. However, it's clear from what he's done with this fortune over the past 15 years that his dreams go bigger than business success, bigger than the company itself and bigger than his own lifetime. As he collects his honorary doctorate in architecture he muses about his own company, but also calls on the room to consider the impact of their own actions, saying: 'The future is not wholly ours, nor is it wholly not ours.' The appeal of butter yellow — luminous, optimistic, sunny — is undeniable. Some fashion industry leading lights are dubbing it "the new neutral", applauding its versatility and compatibility with a whole host of staples like blue denim and black. And like butter, it slips into one's repertoire with ease. At legendary London department store Selfridges, which boasts its own iconic chrome yellow brand and packaging, the new variant is across the store. 'We've seen butter yellow spread across the runway for SS25, with brands Alaia, Toteme and 16Arlington all presenting soft, pale yellow hues across various silhouettes and accessories," says Laurie Field, Selfridges Buying Manager. "We of course have been long-term advocates of the colour yellow, but the sunny shade is sometimes overlooked. Try Lemaire's fortune croissant bag, Khaite's zesty, cashmere jumper, and Posse's airy linen set.' The shade is trending at all levels from couture to high street. At Uniqlo, where British born Clare Waight Keller is the new(ish) creative director, you can find it in soft ribbed jersey polo tops, bra tops and pocketable UV protection zip jackets. Having done her time at designer brands and houses Givenchy, Chloe and Gucci, Waight Keller is bringing her prowess to one of the most powerful movers in high street retail. 'It is a whole new territory for me and leads me deep into technological and material advances, as well as overseeing the colour, silhouettes and styles," she explains. Butter yellow has even seeped into the rarefied echelons of haute couture. Australian born couturier, Tamara Ralph, made it a focus of her January collection shown in Paris. Yellow is a natural fit for the sunny antipodean designer, who's known for her dreamy, flamboyant gowns favoured by stars including Bella Hadid and Priyanka Chopra. "In my opinion, the right colour can completely transform a look and its overall feeling," says Ralph, who fashioned a gorgeous, airy off-the-shoulder taffeta gown and a crystal siren gown embellished with ostrich feather pom poms in the hue. "Butter yellow — or as I refer to it, baby yellow — brings with it an element of joy and cheerfulness, but in such a way that is still elegant and innately feminine: it is more quietly luxurious than a bright hued yellow." Butter yellow is also being championed by fine jewellery designers like Cora Sheibani, who specialises in highly artful one-off pieces. 'I am currently using lots of citrines, which my stone cutter calls Palmeira citrine," she says. "It has a beautiful deep colour that pairs so well with other stones and looks great on most people. "I have also just designed a fabulous piece with a huge round Sphalerite, which looks like the sun and is a stone I have never worked with before but am very excited about.' But where does a fad for a colour really gain momentum? Recall a famous scene in The Devil Wears Prada in which Miranda Priestly (Meryl Streep) lectures Andrea Sachs (Anne Hathaway) about the rise of cerulean blue, and high fashion's authority to declare what colours unwitting consumers will soon be wearing. 'It's not just blue, it's not turquoise, it's not lapis, it is cerulean,' says Priestly, explaining how cerulean trickled down from the runway to wind up colouring Sachs' bulky cable knit sweater. "That blue represents millions of dollars and countless jobs, and it's sort of comical how you think that you've made a choice that exempts you from the fashion industry when, in fact, you're wearing a sweater that was selected for you by the people in this room. From a pile of 'stuff'." But butter yellow isn't so much trickling down as crashing over the industry in an exuberant wave. The exact tone would have been decided upon over three years ago as dye manufacturers, trend forecasters and fabric makers decide on the colour palette of the 2025 season. Those materials will have been shown at trade fairs, including Premiere Vision in Paris, where designers chose the palette and order the fabrics that help guide the look and feel of a collection. If butter yellow or BarbieCore pink (2024) or cerulean blue is trending, there's a commercial imperative to work with that direction. Fashion only changes with a consensus shift. Early adopters help. Take Timothée Chalamet in his custom-made butter yellow suit at the Oscars, which was designed by Givenchy's new creative director, Sarah Burton. He looked fresh and playful set against the traditionalists in black tie. His appearance heralded a new chapter at Givenchy and kickstarted a mass fashion trend; since then, Rihanna, Sabrina Carpenter and Hailey Bieber have all donned butter yellow super boosting the vibe. Tempted? An easy buy is Chanel Le Vernis nail polish in Ovni. "I think that, generally, more designers and brands are embracing the use of colour," says Ralph. "And colour in unexpected hues. With yellow specifically, you often see tones of mustard, lemon and even veering into more of a cream, but butter yellow offers a fresh, new take. "The colour in and of itself stands out and is best paired with a well-tailored suit or separates or — on the opposite end of the spectrum — well-draped, billowy gowns with little or otherwise subtle embellishment that allow it to truly shine." This colour turnover is one way for the fashion industry to signal "freshness", and it's arguably the versatility of the shade that gives it its true power. 'Butter yellow is a gentle way to introduce colour to your wardrobe, the new neutral," says Field at Selfridges. "It's easy to wear and flattering for all skin tones." Once you tune in, you'll be spotting the hue everywhere. Consider it a form of everyday gold.
