April 16, 2024 |
Luca Magliano is shaping up to be the poster boy for Italian fashion’s future. There’s palpable excitement around the namesake label that engulfed the 36-year-old’s most recent show, unveiled back in January at Pitti Uomo. He skipped out on the grand Florentine palazzos usually favoured by designers invited to unveil their collections at the esteemed men’s trade show for a sports arena on the outskirts of the city.
In what the designer described as an “impromptu occasion for glamour”, bleacher seats were ripped from their stands to make way for a giant, cream, carpeted staircase from which models descended to an ear-splitting, industrial soundtrack.
They appeared from a backlit, smoke-filled doorway, like outcasts dancing in and out of street lights in the dead of night. Their clothes were crumpled, rugged and reeked of lived-in glamour. Like Martine Rose in London, Magliano is quite the anthropologist in his approach to design. His collections are at once soaringly romantic and weighted by reality, cinematic without the Hollywood tint. He looks to his native Bologna and the characters that have wandered its streets, both now and in a bygone life, for inspiration. He still lives and works in the city. “Bologna, it’s a special place in Italy, it represents a lot,” he says over Zoom. “Here I feel like I’m surrounded by the things that matter to me.”
from left: Oscar and Kostiantyn wear MAGLIANO
We’re talking in the days following his Pitti show, where more eyes than ever were on the rising talent after he bagged the Karl Lagerfeld Special Jury Prize at the LVMH Prize last June. There he took home a cash sum of £170,000 and is currently receiving specialist mentoring from the fashion conglomerate, which coupled with financial backing from a group of young Italian investors has seen Magliano accelerate his business (until the start of 2023, he was working other jobs to support the label). “Now we are starting to add people to the team, which will be quite a challenge as I’m used to working like an old bear in his cave,” he says.
Agneza wears MAGLIANO
“Being a spectator is not something that should be taken easily,” says Magliano of his catwalk shows, which have previously been held in old snooker halls and dilapidated warehouses. Often dimly lit and soundtracked with a tense score, on the catwalk he embraces making his guests feel a little uneasy. “You are invited but we want you to make an effort,” he says. “This is not because I’m a cocky piece of shit. It’s because it’s a relationship; to enter a relationship, both parties must be willing and determined, and make sacrifices.”
His first physical show in the capital in 2022 took place at Circolo Arci Bellezza, a cultural space favoured by revered director Luchino Visconti, who shot 1960 film Rocco and His Brothers at the location. He often looks to films, not for their plots but their atmospheres, to help craft his catwalk shows. His latest outing, for instance, drew inspiration from the closing scene of Andrei Tarkovsky’s Nostalghia (1983), which is backdropped by a colossal Roman staircase captured in cold, beige-tinted light.
from left: Alessandra and Kostiantyn wear MAGLIANO
Magliano’s collections collide classic Italian tailoring with fragments of workwear that riff on the uniforms that family members wore through his youth. “It’s something that belongs to me in a way,” he says. “I remember my father wearing those kinds of clothes – there is an emotional attachment to the silhouette.” There’s an offbeat elegance to his designs. Each is peppered with personal glamour and is celebratory of his working-class roots. Like his SS22 outing, inspired by the blue-collar overalls that Italian factory workers have worn for decades. Or AW23’s tailoring, made purposefully dishevelled, as if deteriorated from years of wear, in what Magliano dedicated to “the fatigue” of il travaglio, i.e. working folk. “It’s important for me to talk about my heritage, where I come from and what I know best,” he says.
Invited to show at Pitti again, this time as a guest designer – a privilege previously bestowed on the likes of Raf Simons, Jonathan Anderson and Grace Wales Bonner – he charged on a quest to mess with the “fundamental codes” of a classic menswear wardrobe. He’s passionate about disrupting gender binaries and uplifting queer bodies through his work. “Investigating the concept of classics, this is something we’ve always done – it’s been the subtitle of Magliano since the very beginning,” he says. “Showing at Pitti, which is the place for classics, it was the right moment for us to explore the concept, not just as a subtitle but to inform the entire process of the collection.”
from left: Sandra and Samuele wear MAGLIANO
Tailoring was baggy, twisted and pinned in divine formations as layers spilt out of trousers and beneath shirts. The models carried Magliano-branded plastic shopping bags as they slowly paced through the space, clad in heavy woollen overcoats, slouchy knits, beaten-up suits and ladies-who-lunch tweed jackets repositioned as anarchic cardigans with chewed-up hemlines. They stalked the sports arena with anti-hero flair. “We spend a lot of time during the casting briefing how the models should walk. We don’t look for professional models, we love the idea of stealing people from reality.”
Although Magliano, on paper, is classed as menswear, his collections are often informed by women the designer admires. His mood board this season was populated by everyone from the Italian poet Patrizia Cavalli and German artist Hanne Darboven to a snapshot of Anna Magnani beaming from ear to ear after taking home an Oscar in 1955 for her first English-speaking film The Rose Tattoo.
“This is a good moment in history to reconsider the value of ‘classics’, to give it another common meaning, freed from relations of power. Freed from relations of sex,” says the designer. “In the next stages of Magliano, this is something we want to make ours more and more.”
Kok wears MAGLIANO
One model wore a chest binder made in collaboration with Amsterdam brand Untag beneath their crisp, ivory suit. “The binder was the most urgent thing we wanted to do. It was something we thought about for quite some time now and I’m so proud of it,” he says. It will be stocked directly on the brand’s website soon and won’t be sold to market. “We recognise the importance of the object outside of fashion, we don’t want to appropriate it. It’s more about opening the brand to new bodies, this was super important in the collection. The idea of wardrobe classics has to deal with a new kind of formality, a new kind of body, a body of the future. Gender is a path, you can walk in it, and it’s very important clothes consider this. It’s our duty to consider this.”
This collection also saw Magliano collaborate with hat company Borsalino and Napoli-based Kiton, a menswear heavyweight, for some of his most elevated creations so far. “Working together with them was like testing a new territory for us in how we want to grow the brand,” says Magliano. His sights for the label’s future are bright. “Classics are long-lasting and involve a way of doing things that are highly artisanal. We want to focus on this to bring Magliano to another level, a sartorial way of existing.”
Taken from 10 Magazine Issue 72 – DARE TO DREAM – out now! Order your copy here.
from left: Soufiane and LJ wear MAGLIANO, Giacomo De Rossi and Luca Magliano
MAGLIANO: THE NEW CLASSIC
Photographer GESUALDO LANZA
Text PAUL TONER
Models KOK MACH KON at YU Agency, KATIE CRAVEN at Boom Models, LJ CHAWECH at Independent Model Management, NINO PEREIRA at Supa Model Management, ZAIR CHESEAUX and SHUNTO MATSUNAGA at D’Management, AGNEZA DORKIN and SANDRA MATHIOU at Silver Model Management, OSCAR MCGREGOR at Zebedee Talent and CARO SCHECHTNER at Let It Go, SOUFIANE LAMAR, ALESSANDRA PEDRAZZOLI and TILAYE at Street People Casting and SAMUELE BUTTAZZO, SARA LEGHISSA, LOUNA ACKER, GIANCARLO FERRARESI and PIERGIUSEPPE DI TANNO
Location Florence, Italy
Designer LUCA MAGLIANO
Stylist ELISA VOTO
Hair LOUIS GHEWY
Make-up PATRICK GLATTHAAR
Casting JULIA ASARO
