Pitti Uomo, the twice-a-year international clothing trade show in Florence, Italy usually hosts a guest designer for each iteration and this year the honor went to Israeli designer and Karl Lagerfeld Prize by LVMH winner Hed Mayner. Mayner is known for playing with the volume and scale of clothing which is what he showed yesterday in Florence. There are a few little flashes of uniqueness like a silver sequined top and bottom worn under a brown trench with enormous arms, or a pair of crinkly, silver pants that look to be made out of the type of flame retardant material firefighters wear. But what was most important were the cuts of the garments. Look how he makes the arms of his jackets curve backward but how he sets the shoulder seams forward so the wearer seems to be pitched forward, hunching. As
he told Vogue during a preview, "There is something about the wrongness of the thing that I like... When we talk about the made-to-measure approach to tailoring, the body is seen in a very specific way, with this kind of sharpness. But there’s not just one way of seeing the body, so we work a lot [exploring] different shapes. It’s something that I feel we should do with clothes; it’s about the form, the essence of the thing."
The setting for the show was interesting too, considering the ideas of minimalism, volume, and scale. Models walked in the Palazzina Reale di Santa Maria della Novella, a white marble cube built in 1935, which sits next to the Firenze Santa Maria Novella train station, or SMN for short, a spectacular example of Fascistic architecture. I created a photo essay of the station many years ago, seen
here. The combination of woods and marbles and the 1930s Rationalism of the Palazzina looks to have been the perfect backdrop.
https://www.instagram.com/hedmayner
