Visual Design

Pal Zileri

Pal Zileri • Year 2014

Front and back cover of the Pal Zileri book on a light grey surface: polished black shoes on concrete with the Pal Zileri wordmark, and a plain concrete texture on the back.

The challenge

A bound book for the backstage of a Pal Zileri show, told through one photographer's eye.

In 2014 photographer Vincenzo Liazza shot the casting and the backstage of a Pal Zileri fashion show: models waiting, fittings, polaroids pinned to the wall, the quiet before the runway. He wanted those pictures to live in a bound book rather than on a screen.

My job was the book itself: choosing the sequence, pairing the pictures across the spreads, setting the pace between full-bleed images and white space, and giving the whole volume a theme — a quiet, tailored rhythm, like the clothes.

The layout was built in InDesign around a grid of fine gold lines that echoes the tailor's chalk and the cut of a suit; the photographs stay black and white, the paper does the rest.

Sector
Fashion — photo book
Duration
2014 (Milan)
Team
With Vincenzo Liazza, photographer
Tools
InDesign, Photoshop, Illustrator
Detail of the book cover: polished black lace-up shoes and grey wool trousers on a concrete floor, with the Pal Zileri wordmark in thin capitals.

My role

  • Editorial layout
  • Sequence and pacing of the pictures
  • Visual theme and cover

Photographs by Vincenzo Liazza.

Close-up of the open book: a black and white photograph of a model in a black sweater, hand at his chin, printed across the page.
Black and white photograph of a glass skylight against a dark sky, seen from below.
The Casting page: a large portrait of a young model on the left, a wall of polaroids of models on the right, crossed by thin gold lines.
Spread with two backstage photographs, a man in a coat and people at the press wall, laid over a grid of thin gold lines.

The result

A hardbound book where each spread is a scene: the casting wall, the fittings, the models between one look and the next. Photographs pair across the gutter, white pages give them air, and thin gold lines tie the sequence together.

A small print run for the photographer and the brand — a backstage kept on paper.