Dressing Up in a Scorsese Movie
Stop me if you’ve heard this one before: A gangster, a family man, a driver, and a blue-collar worker walk into a bar. Turns out they’re all the same guy — an idea of a man created in part by a series of film-inspired shorts created by the clothing brand Libero. Good joke. Everybody laugh. Roll on snare drum. Curtains.
Started in 2018 by Adam Appugliesi, Libero is one of the many up-and-coming brands worth spilling some ink over, with co-signs from actors Adam Pally and Kit Harrington, LA Galaxy footballer Raheem Edwards, and Eagles player James Bradberry. What differentiates Libero from those other brands isn’t so much the quality (although that is certainly a factor) but how Appugliesi uses the language of cinema to convey a tone about the brand.
Movies were a part of Libero from the start. “I grew up on film, and I grew up on like cinema, because of my brother [and] because of my dad,” Appugliesi tells SPY. “So it was no brainer, for lack of a better word, to be like, ‘Okay, for shooting a campaign video, it’s going to be this Neo-noir, or it’s going to be this John Cassavetes type of look,’ because that’s what I love. … I don’t see a lot of brands having this in-depth concept and then portraying it through film the way that I do.” The cinematic tone is present right from the get-go. The teaser video from the Le Mans jacket, the brand’s signature piece, is shot in a near Academy ratio, scored to a stirring number that’s light on details, allowing future shoppers to fill in the details. While Appugliesi is modeling the jacket, you only see his face momentarily. Otherwise, it’s easy for viewers to imagine themselves wearing the car-inspired jacket to hop in their cars. Where’s this Libero man going? What’s he up to? It invites conversation immediately, just like any good film.
The concept of the Libero man shifted and crystallized when Appugliesi brought in a new model: his very own father. The decision was born out of tragedy; Applugliesi’s partner he started the brand alongside passed away about a year-and-a-half into its lifespan and often served as the primary model. “No one’s gonna fill those shoes,” he plainly states. “But this is so much of my baby that I can’t let anybody into this. So my dad was the guy. …my father is this really handsome, good-looking guy who carries the clothes really well. But he also reads as if you see some shit. And that’s why there’s a sense of maturity. There’s a sense of authenticity, similar to Martin Scorsese and Francis Ford Coppola.”
Pappa Appugliesi, aka Mario, was initially skeptical of his son’s venture but his fears softened when it started to do well — it also may have helped that Libero is the name of Mario’s father, making the whole affair familial. Mario’s model move came with humorous growing pains, including blasting darts in between takes and asking to “get this over with” before settling into the seriousness and importance of it all. “Now, people only know Libero because of my Dad,” Appugliesi says. “He is like a sole pillar that we stand on because of how he’s conveyed this story and made you believe, Yeah, this guy’s a mobster. This guy is a hard-working construction man. This guy’s a family man.”
The critical component in selling the narrative around the Libero man is the storytelling itself. With Mario as a pillar, the brand draws inspiration from all of its favorite cinematic muses. The most recent shoot saw Applugliesi recreate his parents’ wedding day with a key shot that feels like it was yanked directly from a critical moment in Paul Thomas Anderson’s Phantom Thread or the grand stage in the Cuba party sequence of The Godfather Part II. The Spring/Summer 2023 collection is a homage to movies like Goodfellas, including lookbook imagery that looks like a gangster under surveillance from the law.
Making this happen is a creative process that evokes the auteur theory. “…I know the shot,” Applugliesi says. “it’s a marriage that I have between our cinematographer and our DPs. They’ll come over the house, [and] I’ll play them a bunch of movies, I’ll play them certain scenes, and I’m like, ‘Look, we’re going for this — [but] not too on the nose. Let’s take some of it off of it. Let’s double down on this.’”
All of this filmmaking is in service of understanding Applugliesi’s idea of the Libero man. “I want to create [a] world with my father being the leading man and creating a Libero man who could be a gangster and find ways to make money any way he needs to. It could be a hard-working construction guy who provides for his family. The Libero man could be a lover who loves his wife and wants to dance with her every time that he can. It’s [about] crafting believable men.”
Movies are just like that. They take actors and put them into various roles and let you believe those people are totally other people. Through the language of cinema, Libero is cultivating a world where the people who wear their clothes are world-class drivers, sophisticated and dangerous career criminals, or even simple men who love their spouses. As another famous film that’s probably influenced Applugliesi at one point or another, when you’re in Libero, the world is yours.