FLORENCE — Menswear is tribal. It’s all about opposing clans, affiliation, codes of conduct, fed on the eternal tensions between old and new, right and wrong. In today’s world of growing divisions — heated rivalry? — this was perhaps more pronounced at the latest installment of Pitti Uomo. Indeed, there are many ways to be a man today, and clothes reflect that.
What hits you straightaway at Pitti are the attendees: We saw “goths vs sarts, trads vs retros, preppies vs sneakerheads,” as Scott “The Sartorialist” Schuman put it in one of his posts on the de facto catwalk that is the trade fair’s central pavilion. Here, however, it’s “sarts” that take the lead. Witness the posse of besuited men — peacocks almost farcical in their stubborn dedication to gentlemanly formality — who paraded through the streets for the first edition of Sebiro Sanpo, or “suit walk,” to take place outside of Tokyo. It was comical and more than a little anachronistic, but it was also a reminder that men who dress formally do exist and that subtle variation on a theme is what they are after — and what Pitti is fundamentally about.
And yet the event is cleaved in two: the expositors at the Fortezza da Basso, focusing on a wide range of product — from Brunello Cucinelli’s softwashed tailoring to Denobiliaryparticle’s exquisite knits with a classy inherited-from-your-ancestors charm; from Bonastre’s supple bags to Rag & Bone’s ruggedly refined take on the city dweller and Mackintosh’s impeccably modern raincoats — and those who push the limits with a show or experiments in image-making.
This time, the tension was underscored by an enormous installation in the main square, devised by Marc Leschelier and curated by Philéo: 18 monoliths made of scaffolding covered in Leschelier’s signature “concrete canvas,” a cement-based fabric-like material, used for infrastructure applications — ground fixing, for instance — which, once installed and moistened, hardens within 24 hours. Entitled Ancient/New Site, and reminiscent of Stonehenge, but also brutally soft like archaeological remnants of a distant future, these sculptures offered not only much needed visual wonder, but also food for thought: the contrast with the peacocks on parade and Pitti’s staid spirit more broadly was a wake-up call.
Enter Hed Mayner, the Israeli champion of reformed tailoring who has recently decamped to Europe, living between Paris and Bergamo, where he works at Modartis, the supplier that has recently taken over the brand’s production. Mayner has been an early purveyor of abstract shapes rooted in emotion, and humongous volumes. Slowly but steadily, he has grown into a niche auteur with huge potential, and this latest endeavour, showed in the elegantly rationalist premises of Palazzina Reale, a building that offers a liminal, spare transition from train station to city, highlighted how far he has come from the original seeds of his language.
Still working with large shapes, Mayner keeps tweaking them to create a poignant engagement between clothing and body, gesture and wearing, and the result felt mature, whilst still burning with the drive to explore new ground. Mayner’s imaginary body language, all sloping shoulders and bending arms, his ode to wrongness as rightness, was a seditious counterpoint to all the sartorial righteousness. Delivered with calm and elan, it felt impactful.
Mariavittoria Sargentini’s take on sartorial style with Labo, the new chapter of her label Marvielab, was at once hands on, abstract and concise: a modular series of pieces in three sizes and three weights, all mixable, presented as toiles on a couple of performing dancers to the sound of an accordion. This reminded me how much the act of dressing can be free and playful — in this case in a mathematical kind of way.
In the first foray outside of Japan with his eponymous label Shinyakozuka, designer Shinya Kozuka delivered a poetic take on winter dressing for the mountains or the city, charged with the soft naïveté that the Japanese master so well. Not at all formal, never predictably informal, the proposal came across as gentle, plausible and fresh, with knitted aprons as a lovely standout.
Galib Gassanoff, the Milan-based Georgian designer who’s making waves with his sculptural and powerfully raw take on his homeland’s crafts, collaborated with Consinee, the Chinese luxury yarnmaker, for a project entitled “Echoes of Craft.” Curated by Sara Sozzani Maino, the endeavour was an expansive and striking exploration of tactile surfaces and dramatic volumes. The static presentation left something to be desired, but once a few of the pieces hit the catwalk in Gassanov’s next show, their full potential is sure to be unleashed.
Over at Tangtsungchien, it was a quest for soft masculinity and frilly tactility. The Paris-trained Taiwanese designer, a debutante, still has a long way to go, but there was a lot of potential in the slouchy, genderless poetry of his silhouettes, in the intricacy of the handiwork. There was a lot of 1990s Giorgio Armani, too: an influence which is persistent on designers trying to break the formality mold with gentility, confirming how groundbreaking, radical and timeless Mr. Armani’s work was and its ability to speak to different generations.
It was at Soshiotsuki, the up-and-coming Japanese label headed by Soshi Otsuki, however, that Armani-isms, albeit rooted in nostalgia, took a progressive, touching, inspiring turn, showing how malleable the sartorial code and the language of formality actually are. The designer, who recently secured the LVMH Prize, has never made a secret of his penchant for a peculiar moment in Japanese society: the economic bubble of the 1980–90s, when businessmen were decked in Armani. Filtered through a Takeshi Kitano lens — gangsters, in those movies, favoured Yohji — it made for an exquisite exploration of gesture, posture and cut, and for swagger that came in natural rather than farcical or forced ways. References to Giorgio and Yohji were all over the slouchy volumes, but there was a sense of exquisiteness and fragility all Otsuki’s own. The subtle play with proportion, the mellow colours felt like an antidote to peacockery.
