Luca Magliano skipped out on the grand Florentine palazzos usually favoured by Pitti Uomo’s guest designers for a sports arena on the outskirts of the city. Dimly lit, with a gaggle of seats ripped from the stands to make room for a cream-coloured staircase, models appeared from a back-lit, smoke-filled doorway before descending onto the catwalk – all to an ear-splitting, industrial soundtrack. Cinematic, it made a fitting location for Magliano’s anthropological approach to design, which studies life lived in his native Bologna (where he still lives and works today) through a nostalgic lens.
The brand’s profile has ballooned since it made its debut at the trade fair five years ago. Yet the designer – who took home the Karl Lagerfeld Prize at this year’s LVMH Prize, and a cash prize of 200,000 euros – finds enjoyment in being an outsider, using his brand to uplift the community that surrounds him.
Throughout the collection, he toyed with menswear classics, disrupting gender binaries through the “radical savoir faire” that Italian fashion is built upon. Tailoring was baggy, twisted and pinned in divine formations as layers spilt out of trousers and beneath shirts. Models carried Magliano-branded plastic shopping bags as they slowly paced through the space, clad in heavy woollen overcoats, slouchy knits and street-centric suiting made in collaboration with fellow Italian brands Kiton and Borsalino. One model wore a binder made in collaboration with Untag beneath their crisp, ivory silk blazer, whilst another donned a ladylike tweed cardigan, frosted with glitter, that was repositioned as a laddish jacket with a chewed-up hemline.
In his show notes, Magliano described a series of garments as being “the outcome of a joyous sabotage of development processes”, as he continued to define the off-beat elegance he’s become known for.
Photography courtesy of Magliano.
