MILAN, Italy — A certain amount of anticipation had built up among the spectators invited to experience Alessandro Sartori’s debut as the artistic director at Ermenegildo Zegna on a cold Friday, which happened to fall — luckily or unluckily — on the 13th.

They came expecting an aesthetic jolt from a gifted journeyman who had served this house before, as the creative director of Z Zegna, before leaving in 2011 to help Moet Hennessy Louis Vuitton transform the venerable Italian cobbler, Berluti, into a luxury goods juggernaut.

They came puzzling over how Mr. Sartori would top the act of his predecessor, Stefano Pilati, a designer whose visionary outlook on fashion, whether for women or men, has not always translated well into sales.

They came because, of course, Zegna is the 800-pound gorilla of Italian luxury, a company that manufactures not just the woolens but, quietly, the garments for more labels than you can name.

“They have the best seamstresses and tailors in the world,” the young American actor McCaul Lombardi, kitted out that morning in a custom Zegna suit, said from the front row. “They can do anything.”

The fact that Zegna can do anything and, moreover, has the heft to influence the course of an industry crucial to the Italian economy left at least one viewer wondering at the end of Mr. Sartori’s ponderous and misjudged first outing: What exactly is the business play?

The setting was a hangar on the outskirts of the city in which the German artist Anselm Kiefer’s collection of crumbling concrete towers, titled “The Seven Heavenly Palaces,” was installed in 2004. More than curatorial fastidiousness had kept the place from being used before as a fashion show backdrop. Massive, symbolically weighty, alluding to death and destruction, the monumental Kiefer pieces render puny both human ambition and scale.

Using the work of an important artist as décor did no particular favors to a collection based largely on fabric innovations (asked afterward what single element meant most to him, Mr. Sartori named a kind of knitwear technology) and one that forged little new ground.

Suits with sweat-pant hems, nubby wools, drop-crotch trousers, quilted gilets, neatly barbered shearling, ski pants, hoodies and boiler suits in what looked to be old teddy-bear pelts (actually cashmere alpaca) were tinted the typically offbeat hues preferred by Mr. Sartori who, like Mr. Pilati, is a master colorist.

As a rule, designer honeymoons at big houses tend to be lavish affairs, and this was no exception. The problem is that hubris as outsize as Mr. Sartori’s in staging a debut amid Mr. Kiefer’s colossal towers can almost be counted on to leave a viewer with the impression of an elephant giving birth to a mouse.