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Pitti Uomo 91 - 2017
BLURRING BOUNDARIES.
MENSWEAR RE-IMAGINED AT PITTI UOMO 91.
MINI FASHION partners with Pitti, L’Uomo Vogue and GQ Italia to present six innovative designers from around the world for a BOLD MEETS GENDERLESS approach to men’s fashion.
For MINI, The Latest Fashion Buzz at Pitti Uomo 91 in January 2017 was an opportunity to support designers who share an optimistic take on contemporary style and a willingness to re-think fashion norms. In the relaxed atmosphere of MINI’s space at the heart of the Fortezza da Basso, MINI partnered with Pitti, L’Uomo Vogue and GQ Italia to present the work of six young designers exploring new concepts in menswear; blurring its edges and breaking its boundaries, raiding its past and re-imagining its future.
The prêt-à-porter designers worked on a new concept of modernity in menswear: BOLD MEETS GENDERLESS. The six selected labels embody the MINI concept – BOLD MEETS GENDERLESS, a modern approach, making clothes for a new generation that increasingly sees gender as fluid and flexible.
This border-crossing tendency also relates to MINI’s overall approach to fashion, connecting with our roots while exploring new territory.
A POWERFUL COMBINATION OF HOME-GROWN TRADITION AND NEW EXPERIENCES IN FAR-FLUNG PLACES.
With The Latest Fashion Buzz, the designers got a platform to display their ideas to an international audience in an outstanding location. From the beginning, the project aims at offering visibility and support to new talents in fashion ‘who work on a new concept of modern in both the formal and sophisticated informal keys’.
Participating designer Magliano, for example, is as much inspired by the traditions of his Italian heritage as he is by the ‘unexpected connections’ he made later as a student. Yushan Li and Jun Zhou of PRONOUNCE are born territory-shifters, not just because they’re based between Milan and Shanghai, but because Shanghai itself is a place where heritage regularly collides with the future, taking the pair’s work in unexpected directions. Goetze likewise blends the traditional with the experimental, taking classic men's fashion motifs and shifting and merging them, arriving at a hybrid that suits all body types, regardless of gender.
CHALLENGING OUR IDEAS AND RE-SHAPING OUR THOUGHTS.
David Catalan, meanwhile, draws his inspiration from a peak period for gender play in pop culture - the late '90s, particularly the look seen in clubland movies like Go! (1999) and Human Traffic (1998). For Catalan, returning to one’s roots—in this case his own youth—is the key to fluid fashion for the future. By contrast, Feng Chen Wang finds a glimpse of tomorrow in today; her silvery jackets look ‘futuristic’, but it's the cords and cables she sews into her garments that tell us of her real priorities, evoking ‘connectivity in the digital age’, and celebrating its ability to fling us into unfamiliar situations in an instant, challenging our ideas and re-shaping our thoughts.
‘What is identity’ asks Portugal’s Estelita Mendonça, ‘To know where you belong? To know who you are?’ For Mendonça and the five other designers collected at The Latest Fashion Buzz, the answers to these questions are never simple. For MINI FASHION, it’s exactly this habit of questioning that makes their work so valuable in the 21st century. What they share in common is the belief that identity is a process we’re going through rather than a destination we can arrive at, which is surely why their approach to fashion is so nimble and flexible—hopping back and forth between home and abroad, tradition and innovation, what we are and what we might become.
WHAT IS YOUR IDENTITY? DO YOU KNOW WHO YOU ARE?