Maybe it was the unusual high-pressure weather system, what Kanye West called “crazy lucky weather” — constant light breezes ruffling the umbrella pines, armadas of seven-story clouds sailing across the skies high above the old stones of Florence.
Or
maybe it was Matteo Renzi, Italy’s new, young prime minister, breezing
into town to deliver a $2.7 million cash infusion to Pitti and a message
of Italian unity to the scores of manufacturers, 1,165 exhibitors and
the many thousands of international press and buyers crowding into this
fabled city for the men’s wear fair Pitti Uomo.
Whatever
the cause, optimism was the tone of an event that, while ostensibly
only a trade fair, tends to be a bellwether for the men’s wear industry.
Much
more than seasonal trend-setting takes place at Pitti Uomo; a mood is
established and for the past four days here, it has been one of optimism
measured by the extent that men are dressing up again.
Still digging itself out — like all fashion — from the economic doldrums
and the lingering drag that casualization has had on creativity, men’s
wear seems on the brink of some hopeful changes. If not exactly the dawn
of a sartorial Renaissance, we are quite possibly entering the Age of
the Natty Fellow.
He
is everywhere at the Pitti enclave and throughout Florence, wearing
snug trousers that show off some ankle, a lightweight cotton blazer so
fitted it leaves no margin for Twinkies, shoes with proper hard soles,
and most of the ensemble — shoes included — in assertive colors such as
cobalt blue.
Oh, and he is probably wearing a waxed mustache, a Gabriele d’Annunzio beard and a straw boater.
Does
anyone remember Casual Friday? Hoodies and sneakers? Mark Zuckerberg?
The inexorable march of heritage brands and artisanal everything has had
an unexpectedly affirmative effect on men’s dressing — or anyway it has
among the early adopters one finds here. The Natty Fellow’s style is a
visual amalgam of “Mad Men,” the New York retailer Freemans Sporting
Club and Joe E. Brown in “Some Like It Hot.” That the Natty Fellow
himself is likely too young to recognize two out of three of those
references matters little. What he doesn’t know, Google Image will
provide.
As
a result, all kinds of seemingly anachronistic trades were highlighted
here. Traditional shoemakers from the English county of Northamptonshire
made a strong showing. So, too, did Neapolitan perfumers, Sicilian
barbers, venerable Swedish shirtmakers. Even the producers of a special
Japanese shoe polish showed up at Pitti, bringing along a shoeshine
expert, Hiroaki Mitsuhashi, to demonstrate how he achieves a softly
lustrous shine by buffing with the palm of his hand.
At
a pop-up barbershop installed by the century-old barber supply company
Proraso in the fair’s main pavilion, a heavily tattooed Roman barber
named Cosimo Di Gorga applied hot towels to volunteers before cleaning
up their whiskers with his straight razor. As it happened, few of the
takers were smooth-cheeked, lavish growths of facial hair being another
notable Pitti Uomo trend.
Behind
the apparent quaintness of all that revivalism there is real local and
global economic significance: “One by one, the lights are going back on
in little factories,” said Alison Hargreaves, head of publicity for
Grenson shoes, whose booth at the Touch pavilion was crowded with buyers
drawn to newly reimagined classics that appeal to influencers like
Nickelson Wooster, the Instagram style hero known in the blogosphere as
the WoostGod. “At the moment, I’m obsessed with them,” he said.
A
generation that grew up wearing jeans and sneakers has some catching up
to do, according to Stefano Tonchi, the editor of W magazine and
curator of a specially commissioned installation at Pitti Uomo titled
“De’ (Millennials) Costumi.”
“The
codes are being rewritten,” said Mr. Tonchi, whose exhibit took as its
inspiration a timeless book of etiquette for young men, created in the
16th century by the Florentine Giovanni Della Casa. “First you learn the
rules and then you can break them,” Mr. Tonchi added. “Well, maybe not
all the rules: Signore Della Casa said, ‘Don’t stick your hands in
places you keep covered.”’ Advice like that has lost no relevance since
it was written.
Fascinating
things happen where rules are torqued, when rote codes meet innovation.
Take the capsule collection that Pharrell Williams’s Bionic Yarn
created in a partnership with G-Star RAW jeans. Using fibers spun from
recycled plastic waste gathered from the world’s oceans, they produced
jeans that both look cool (Mr. Williams’s Otto the Octopus logo is
incorporated subtly into the weave) and help humans “come together for
Big Blue,” as Mr. Williams noted in a written statement.
Consider
another capsule collection, this one generated by the pairing of
Kazumasa Kobayashi, designer of a Japanese cult bicycle and bike wear,
and Spiewak, a 110-year-old U.S. label founded to provide stevedores on
the Brooklyn waterfront with work clothes and now owned by a Swiss
company. From that collaboration came a gunmetal gray bomber jacket
detailed with such precision that its zippered front opens to reveal an
inner zippered half lining of mesh, a way of keeping covered and
ventilated as you fly around the city on your fixed-gear bike.
“You
know, there is more humor in physics than fashion,” said Sebastian
Dollinger, the 30-year-old designer for Eton, a Swedish shirtmaker
founded in 1928. Mr. Dollinger was referring his own humorous approach
to such stodgy notions as a neutral, “masculine” palette.
“I
wanted to have a lot of color” in the collection, he said of shirts
patterned with the Eton version of the Mod micro-florals seen everywhere
at the fair. “Flowers are an easy and fun way to use a lot of colors
and maybe make people smile.”
No
one at Pitti Uomo confused playfulness for a lack of seriousness; food,
furniture and fashion account for nearly a third of Italy’s export
economy. “I don’t know whether it’s because of Renzi,” said Raffaello
Napoleone, the show’s innovative chief executive and an increasingly
important figure in Italian fashion, referring to the country’s dynamic
young prime minister, formerly the mayor of Florence. “But our exhibitor
and attendance numbers are up substantially over last year, so we are
sensing a mood of optimism.”
That
Pitti Uomo provides a forum not just for industry heavy-hitters but
also for tiny niche brands, startups and unlikely collaborations is a
large part of its appeal to the thousands of international buyers who
descended on Florence, filling its restaurants and driving up hotel
prices. “I love Milan,” said a buyer for a prominent retailer, referring
to the men’s wear shows beginning Saturday in that city. “But at Pitti
you see the trends in real clothes real guys are actually going to
wear.”
You
see designers such as Matteo Gioli and Veronica Cornacchini, two young
hatters that got into the business by apprenticing themselves to
traditional Florentine milliners. “We started making hats for ourselves
and then for our friends and then the friends of friends,” said Ms.
Cornacchini. And now Super Duper hats are sold at Barneys New York.
Their
best seller, the Hobo Hat, is as good an example as any of the
prevalent spirit of adaptive reuse. “We
thought it was boring that the
only hats you could find for traveling were rolling hats,” said Mr.
Gioli. Consulting vintage images of the itinerant railway track-layers
known as gandy dancers, the partners came up with a hat intentionally
designed to be squashed, its rumpled crown part of the charm.
Consistent
with a spirit of cross-pollination that has characterized Mr.
Napoleone’s tenure as head of Pitti, certain Super Duper styles come
lined with Japanese high tech fabric, introduced to the pair by fellow
exhibitors from a label called Norwegian Rain.
“In
Norway, it rains two days out of three,” explained T-Michael, a former
tailor who designs this line of elegantly severe raincoats. “We met
Matteo and Veronica at Pitti and thought that meshing their Florentine
tenderness with Norwegian functionalism would be a brilliant idea.”
And it is.
