What happens when a brand built on painted metal and perfect lap times turns its attention to human skin? Under creative director Rocco Iannone’s watch, Ferrari Style’s AW26 collection treats the body not as the car’s passive passenger but as the primary site of identity, emotion and desire. What moves, then, is the person, their inner tempo and their shifting sense of self. Ferrari has always understood the power of surface – the curve of the bodywork and the gloss of paint. In AW26, those codes are absorbed, trans- lated into a sinewy language of fabric. Clothing becomes a “livery of the self”, a second skin that is less about decoration than about how we choose to appear in the world.

“Skin is one of the most fascinating subjects because it is where the inner world and the outer world meet,” Iannone says. In his hands, skin becomes a metaphorical membrane, gathering memory through touch. Clothing, in this context, is a system of signs and protections that sits so close to the body it starts to behave like a second skin. Ferrari’s cars have often been read as armoured dreams, machines not only of speed, but status and projection. Iannone’s AW26 collection proposes that the same intensity can be relocated to the human spirit. The collection’s diverse nude tones speak of a desire to recreate closeness. Moving from metal to skin doesn’t mean abandoning Ferrari’s culture of surface. “Both can carry meaning, protection and desire,” he says, “but skin carries something even more intimate: our sense of self.”

In a universe as tightly curated as Ferrari’s, the proposal of multiple skins is radical precisely because the brand’s identity is so defined. The Ferrari ethos – performance, excellence, beauty, innovation – remains in place. What changes comes from Iannone’s evolving definition of who is allowed to embody it, and in which ways. Across ten fashion shows since he was appointed creative director of brand diversification in November 2019, he has described his work as “a quest for concision”. The word suggests editing, compression, the stripping away of excess – but he is quick to separate concision from the minimalism fashion often associates with blankness. “Concision is not reduction for the sake of reduction,” he insists. “It is not minimalism as absence.” In AW26, every line comes with a reason, every material with a function.

One of the striking aspects of the AW26 images is how disparate materials – “the impalpable lightness of underwear” at one end, padded duchesse and sturdy leather at the other – resolve into a coherent, soft muscularity on the runway. Iannone has long been drawn to tensions between opposites, and here fabrics become a way of articulating Ferrari’s language as both protective and exposed. “Contrasts have always been central to my way of thinking and designing,” he says. “The body becomes the point where these seemingly different realities coexist.” Here Ferrari’s automotive codes are most thoroughly absorbed: precision, tension, the equilibrium of opposites.

If speed is Ferrari’s most recognisable instinct, Iannone’s AW26 collection is more interested in what happens before the engine roars – movement as psychological transition rather than physical flight. The runway set, designed by duo FormaFantasma, situated the clothes in “an enveloping environment… suspended in a dimension of physical and mental well‑being, in which water is a central presence, a connector between self‑care and the possibility of change.” A circular basin of water occupied the heart of the catwalk, and the models moved around the liquid centre in loops rather than straight lines, under a light that shifted like the weather. Water became a natural image for the kind of fluid movement that interested Iannone: “emotional, psychological and deeply personal”, evoking the moment “when identity evolves, when perception changes, even if nothing visible has happened yet.”

A car expresses confidence in legible gestures – its stance on the track, the roar of its engine. Clothing, Iannone suggests, can never be quite so unilateral. “I do not think atti- tude resides in a single element,” he says. “It emerges from the relationship between the body and the garment.” A cut can create presence; a material can influence behaviour; a silhouette can change posture. The second skin is born from this exchange. Iannone admits that to design inside a brand as saturated with myth as Ferrari is a demanding exercise. “When a brand has such a powerful mythology, the challenge is not to protect it by keeping it still,” he notes. “The challenge is to let it evolve without losing its essence… A brand that understands itself deeply can accommodate plurality; a body that knows itself can move through change without losing its core. On a personal level I would say it comes from the ability to evolve while remaining authentic,” he says. “That is where the future becomes interesting.” .