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BEYOND THE WEAVE : Meet Luca Driusso, Head of Fabrics at SCABAL
88 designs in Eton. The return of Tornado. A new take on Royal Gabardine.
What does it take to bring a collection together? Luca takes us through the decisions, details and ideas behind AW26.
1. When you look at the AW26 collection, what stands out to you?
There are several things that stand out. We've reintroduced Tornado, which had been absent for several seasons, (and it was great fun to design). Eton is always a major development, and this season it was particularly challenging to balance traditional designs and classic shades with more contemporary influences.
Then you have the extraordinary colour palette of Royal Gabardine, the variety of jacketing qualities within Mistral, and the pure cashmere jacketings in Bliss, brought to life with those vibrant, characterful colours.
There's also Freestyle, with its different approach to the world of suiting and its ability to challenge more conventional ideas about tailoring.
It's genuinely difficult to choose what stands out most, because each collection has its own personality and its own story to tell.
2. A customer opens the AW26 bunches for the first time. Where would you tell them to start?
Well, if the customer is looking for a suiting fabric, then Eton is undoubtedly the answer. A bunch as extensive as this one (88 articles!), offering such a wide variety of colours and designs, is certainly an excellent starting point for discovering the new Scabal AW26 collection.
If the customer is looking for a fabric for a jacket or overshirt, Mistral is the obvious choice.
3. What is the biggest development in the collection this season?
Eton, it was fun assembling the bunch. We combined classic business suiting with subtle colour accents, intricate weaves and contemporary influences. The idea was to bridge traditional and contemporary tailoring, offering customers something different from previous collections. It’s all in the details: refined patterns, subtle variations and sophisticated touches that bring a fresh perspective to classic suiting.
4. Which AW26 fabric collection is your highlight ?
Royal Gabardine: You need to hold it in your hands to understand just how fluid it is, while still having a certain firmness and body to it. You see, it's difficult to describe without actually handling the fabric. Traditional English cloth, but with a different kind of drape. Holding it in your hands gives you a sense of how it will drape once tailored into a garment. It's sturdy, yet at the same time remarkably elegant and fluid.
5. Royal Gabardine revisits a fabric tailors know very well. What makes this interpretation different?
Without a doubt, the colour range and the way these fabrics have been constructed.
Gabardine has a very interesting construction, and we’ve used it to play with contrasting yarn colours in the warp and weft. This creates a beautiful depth of colour and, in some cases, an almost iridescent effect.
If you take a closer look at the bunch, you’ll notice that almost every fabric combines two subtly different shades, sometimes with a more pronounced contrast. Once tailored into a garment, the folds and movement reveal these colours in different ways, depending on how the light catches the fabric. That’s what makes Royal Gabardine so interesting.
6. What are customers asking for today that they weren’t asking for five years ago?
We're seeing far more attention being paid to colour than to patterns today, and, above all, to how versatile a fabric can be across different types of garments. A heavyweight cloth originally designed for a winter jacket may also make an excellent overcoat, while a flannel can be transformed into a beautiful overshirt.
This shift encourages a different way of thinking when designing a Scabal collection. It pushes us to look at fabrics from new perspectives and to move beyond some of the traditional categories that have guided cloth development in the past. It also reflects the way customers increasingly approach the fabrics in our bunches today: they are less interested in rigid definitions and more interested in the possibilities a fabric offers and how it can fit into their personal wardrobe- Freestyle is good example.
Our thanks to Luca for taking us beyond the weave. Take a closer look at the Autumn Winter 2026 fabric collection: