Last updated: September 10, 2026
On September 7, Sabato De Sarno was named creative director of Icicle, the Shanghai-founded, Paris-connected ready-to-wear house in which Kering took a minority stake this spring. His first collection for the label is scheduled for autumn/winter 2027-2028. The appointment closes an eighteen-month gap since De Sarno left Gucci in February 2025, and it places him inside a house built on the opposite instinct from the one he spent three years refining there.
At Gucci, De Sarno's signature was a single color. He introduced Rosso Ancora, a deep, burgundy-tinged red, with his first collection in September 2023, and kept building on it from there: handbags, heels, leather garments, a matte lipstick pigmented with the exact shade and packaged to match, even a project called Gucci Design Ancora that recolored five icons of Italian furniture design in the same hue. The color carried a real story: it was drawn from the wall of a Savoy Hotel elevator, where Guccio Gucci once worked as a porter before founding the house. Rosso Ancora was never decoration. It was De Sarno's argument, repeated across three years of collections, that one deliberately held color can carry more weight than a dozen louder ideas.
Icicle runs on a different kind of discipline, one with almost no color at all. Founded in Shanghai in 1997, the house frames its whole philosophy around the harmony between people and materials: vegetable-dyed denim, organic cotton, a Paris flagship that strips the city's Haussmann-era stone facades down to bare curves in brass and walnut. Kering's stake in Icicle's parent company, announced in April as part of its new House of Wonders initiative, was framed around craftsmanship and cultural expertise, not around importing a Gucci-era color story. De Sarno's own statement on the move described being drawn to the deep harmony between Icicle's principles and his creative philosophy, not a plan to reshape the brand in his own image.
That is a harder bet than it sounds. Restraint is not the same as having nothing to say. A single committed color and the decision to leave color out almost entirely both demand a kind of discipline that a wider palette lets a designer avoid. There is nowhere to hide either way.
We build the same way here, on a smaller, more literal scale: black, white, and one considered bordeaux, instead of a full spectrum. On a set like Ariana, the bordeaux lace is the whole statement, not one note among several. On Odri, the cut and the negative space do that same work in black. Both are decisions about what a piece won't reach for, not about how much color it happens to use.
Whether De Sarno's version of that discipline holds at Icicle won't be visible until his first show there, for autumn/winter 2027-2028.
Atelier Notes is where the Lioness team writes about the wider fashion and lingerie industry: runway moments, craftsmanship stories, and the ideas moving through fashion that connect back to how we build our own pieces. Separate voice from the Lioness Studio guides, same team behind it.
