What a Jacket Keeps Hidden

For the New York chapter of Canali’s Under the Surface, ceramic artist Brian Rochefort makes a case for looking twice at the things we think we understand.

Written by Nina Ellis

A well-made jacket can give very little away. The lapel falls into a perfect curve, the shoulder follows the body, and the fabric settles right back into place after you move. Last week at Glasshouse Chelsea, Canali paired a cashmere and vicuña blazer from its Fall/Winter 2026 collection with Brian Rochefort’s ceramic vessels. Their surfaces buckle and swell. Color gathered in the fissures. The pairing makes you want to get closer to both.

Rochefort, who lives and works in Los Angeles, prepares his own clay bodies, adjusting the grain, consistency, and color before he begins to build. He breaks forms apart and puts them back together, firing them repeatedly as he adds slips, pigments, glazes and glass. For the Canali commission, the greens, browns and ochres give way to blues and violets, with flashes of red deeper in the folds. The surfaces recall coral, mineral deposits and volcanic craters, forms that have stayed with him from travels through the Galápagos, the Amazon and East Africa. You can spend a long time following the color around a single vessel and still find a part of it you missed.

The blazer asks for a different kind of attention. Canali counts some 200 steps in its construction. An inner canvas gives the jacket body while keeping it light. A network of stitches persuades the lapel into its curve, and the shoulder has to support the garment while leaving the wearer free to move. The final press helps set the shape. Canali calls the result the jacket’s “memory,” its ability to recover its form after being worn, folded, or packed away. It’s an appealing way to think about a piece of clothing, especially a jacket you expect to live in for years.

New York is one of four chapters in Under the Surface: Shaping the Unseen, alongside commissions by Lihuai Qian in Beijing, Diego Perrone in Milan and Thukral & Tagra in Mumbai. Art critic Cloe Piccoli curated the artist selection for New York and Milan, and filmmaker Yuri Ancarani followed the making of the artworks and the jacket through film and photography.

The pairing feels most revealing when you consider what each maker asks of the material. Rochefort lets the glass pool and the glaze crack, then builds on what the kiln gives him. A tailor works toward the moment a person slips an arm through a sleeve and feels the jacket fall into place. You can see the record of Rochefort’s decisions in the clay. With the jacket, you might understand them best by putting it on.

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