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PARIS — The designer Stefano Pilati, revered in certain fashion circles both for his designs (for Yves Saint Laurent and Ermenegildo Zegna Couture) and for the raffish elegance of his own personal style, is currently professionally unattached and living, somewhat east of any fashion world surveillance, in Germany. Yet there he was one afternoon, in Florence, Italy, during the Pitti Uomo men’s wear fair, taking in the J. W. Anderson fashion show as guests goggled over his cloven-hoofed Margiela boots; there he was again a week later, watching Kim Jones’s Louis Vuitton show; and yet again, this time as an unannounced model for the upstart line GmbH, which, like Mr. Pilati, is based in Berlin.

Whispers began, naturally, of his possible return to fashion. Mr. Pilati, 51, exited Zegna in 2016 after three years at the helm, and he has generally kept a low profile since. Then, in the middle of men’s fashion week in Paris, using his personal Instagram account, he uploaded 17 looks from a new, self-started brand called Random Identities: all of them black, all shown on friends, men and women alike, all “genderless and seasonless” in his conception, and as of now, not for production or sale.

“I won’t reveal any future strategy,” Mr. Pilati wrote in a letter distributed to inquirers. “All I can say is that it won’t be released and produced until the production standards that I want will be in place. It will be rather sooner than later. The relationship between price and value will be exceptional.”

Random Identities, he added, “stands for freedom of behavior, engaging with an idea of experiencing fashion used to support individual choices, beyond the known gender signals.”

Mr. Pilati posted his 17 looks — tailored but provocative, dark but disciplined, in a style a young David Bowie might have appreciated — using Instagram Stories, where content expires after 24 hours, and a day later they were gone, though a video directed by the Berlin-based filmmaker and photographer Matt Lambert remains. It had been a test, Mr. Pilati wrote, “to verify if I am and will be interested to pursue the idea of having a personal brand; to study the IG tool; to study the response.”

The response, he said in a brief telephone conversation, was, “Beyond.”

“Hearts, ‘My icon is back,’ I read everything,” he said. “Someone even wanted to marry me.”

Given the mode of transmission, it is hard to imagine Mr. Pilati wouldn’t be exploring the possibilities of showing (and selling) digitally, rather than via established channels. He protested, for the moment, only that he had been taken with the new possibilities of Instagram, as some other designers have been.

“The fashion that we know and the way that it’s presented — it’s not seen so much on this tool,” Mr. Pilati said. “Maybe that can give us some food for thought. In fact, it’s exactly why I’m doing it. I challenge myself through this tool. I have to say it’s really intriguing. And you know what? It’s extremely fun. Plus at my age, I should start to do something thinking of the new generation and connected to them.”

Strictly speaking, Mr. Pilati is not the only designer to have used the platform in this way: Other designers have debuted collections on the platform in the past. But Mr. Pilati is wandering a path a bit afield from the one taken by the kind of luxury companies at which he made his name. Where it leads isn’t yet certain. But Mr. Pilati is stirring. He has put up three new Instagram posts, spelling out a message: “Back” “To” “Werq.”