At Pitti, Breaking Free From Fashion Stasis

FLORENCE — There is something very Italian about Pitti Uomo, the Florentine trade fair that kicks off the menswear season. It’s not just the focus on sartorial classics and sprezzatura. It’s the sense of stasis. Telling one edition from the next is becoming increasingly difficult.

Edition 107, which closed on Friday, felt repetitive and stuck: a reflection of the turmoil and lack of new ideas in the wider fashion system. Make no mistake, Pitti is a good place for connecting with clients old and new. But there was precious little fashion innovation to be found.

Of course, Pitti is more about product than vision, and the sartorial classics are relatively timeless. Yet it takes the storytelling superpowers of Brunello Cucinelli to make their softly tailored, understated stillness perennially attractive. All those working in this sector want to do a Brunello, underestimating the fact that, more than the honest product, it is how Brunello tells a story – with an accent on ethics and doing good — that makes all the difference.

Highlights inside the fair this season were more about storytelling than product. The sturdy, vintage-inflected outerwear over at Manifattura Ceccarelli was presented through life-sized portraits of common people of note: very Oliviero Toscani, if you ask me. Visually, it was captivating, but the hipster style felt out of sync with the times.

The story over at freshly launched label Engels & Marte was its martial focus on the tailored sports coat: one double breasted blazer with detachable technical layering, in a zillion fabrics. It was to the point and immaculately executed, no extra fuss.

The same focus was to be found at Cascinelli, where ex-Prada designer Filippo Cascinelli delivered a series of field jackets and short parkas that mixed dry decoration, precision and lightness withnoteworthy results, and DeNobiliaryParticle, where this season’s knits included knitted neckties, and everything was made with superior Z. Hinchliffe yarn.

At Champion, newly appointed Champion Europe creative director Maurizio Donadi — an industry veteran with years of experience at Ralph Lauren and a dedicated hoarder of the most authentic vintage workwear and sportswear — did not try to reinvent the wheel right away, but brought new awareness to a dormant brand. The main focus of the relaunch was an experiment in which sartorial/upcycling wunderkinds Riedizione Sartoria, Re-Jàvu and Menadito were given leftover Champion sweatshirts to refashion. The results were tailored peacoats, capes and patchwork trousers that were inventive; a good place to start anew.

Kudos to Chinese luxury yarn giant Consinee Group for sponsoring an experimental knit capsule every season at Pitti Uomo. This time around it was newcomer Luca D’Alena’s turn (full disclosure: the designer was selected by this writer) and he developed a poetic, poignant and welcoming line up of cashmere pieces meant for life in and out of the house. With their elongation, soft padding and sense of intimacy, the pieces struck a chord. (D’Alena is a freelancer; a headhunter on the lookout for a fresh talent full of ideas should look no further).

It was with Pitti’s special fashion shows, however, that the proceedings finally got into gear. At the first men’s-focused runway outing for Maison Margiela MM6, which started as a secondary line but is probably closer to the founder’s ethos than the mainline, the tailored, flamboyant looks appeared to be a dryly humorous parody of Pitti goers and their formality on steroids.

Humour is part of the MM6 practice, so in homage to a legendary Maison Margiela presence at Pitti almost 20 years ago that was all white, this endeavor was all black: a wide black spectrum actually, going from burgundy and chocolate to proper black. As a nod to the Italian ladies who lunch, there was also faux mink, cut into quite masculine bomber jackets, mixed with disco fever metallics. It made for a neat and charming line up of rather straightforward pieces — in a pre-show meeting, two anonymous members of the collective design team talked about designing clothing, not identities — that was brought to life by a fabulously varied cast of men, and women, of all ages and walks of life. At times, the dryness was a bit pervasive, and a tad lifeless, but there were peak moments of energizing exuberance that felt elating.

Finally, LVMH prize winner Satoshi Kuwata delivered a much needed, if calm and considered, blast of fashion — all origami folds, layering and geometric dynamism — with his label Setchu’s first proper presentation on the catwalk. Held in Florence’s Biblioteca Nazionale Centrale, it was a tightly edited show that brought to life Setchu’s multifunctional, transformative ethos, his openness in the dialogue between East and West, man and woman, suggesting an inventive take on the classics. Setchu’s forte is pieces that can be worn in a number of ways, doing more with less. At times, the goings got overly complicated, but when Kuwata kept things straightforward and intuitive, one could feel the spark of invention Pitti, and more broadly fashion, need to escape their current sand trap.