Resort season is beginning to wind down and while all is mostly quiet on the womenswear front, the industry is not done with international summer travel just yet. Mid-June brings the start of Pitti Uomo, a primarily trade-focused event in Florence, Italy, that kicks off the the menswear season. While Pitti can feel like a quieter affair in the grand scheme of fashion’s fabulous weeks due to the smaller number of big-name shows, there is no shortage of street style inspiration, especially for those looking for fresh takes on classic Italian sprezzatura.
That being said, there’s plenty on the runways to look forward during the spring 2027 menswear season, too. Vogue Business’s Lucy Maguire has laid out a cheat sheet for all you need to know for Florence and beyond, including news about this season’s Pitti guest designers Simone Rocha, Dover Street Market’s DSM Kei Ninomiya, and 2024 LVMH prize semifinalist Jiyong Kim. For Rocha, who began introducing her menswear vision in 2022, Pitti will be her first-ever standalone menswear runway show. “So far the menswear has been very hand-in-hand with the womenswear. Now I feel ready for it to stand on its own and be its own proposition,” Rocha told Vogue’s Luke Leitch in March.
Pitti began the tradition of guest designers in the 1990s, when the organization began inviting global names to stage one-off shows alongside the trade show’s exhibitions. “The value of this is that it makes Pitti something more than a fashion trade fair and something different to a fashion week,” Lapo Cianchi, Pitti’s director of communications and events, told Leitch in 2022. “Presenting fashion shows, installations or exhibitions on fashion culture and merging these with the commercial impact of such a big and well-curated trade fair is what makes Pitti different.”
Over the years, designers such as Raf Simons, Vivienne Westwood, Maison Margiela, Dries Van Noten, and Yohji Yamamoto have all found themselves on the Florentine runway. More recent examples include Magliano (the 2023 winner of the LVMH Prize’s Karl Lagerfeld Special Jury Prize), Grace Wales Bonner (who was recently named creative director of Hermès menswear), and Marine Serre. Scroll to see a sampling of the iconic guest designers, plus some of our editor’s favorites, below.
MM6 Margiela, fall 2025 menswear
Photo: Courtesy of MM6 Maison Margiela
Photo: Courtesy of MM6 Maison Margiela
Maison Margiela was first a guest designer at Pitti Uomo in 2006. Photos of the event are difficult to come by. At the show, Martin Margiela had models arrive in all white, save for reflective sunglasses, on the backs of mopeds and in cars. Twenty years later, Margiela’s little sister, MM6, took to Pitti for an equally cinematic showing, this time on an all-black stage. “The collection unfolded as a sleek, sophisticated, and sensual reinterpretation of classic menswear tropes, described by the collective’s spokesperson as ‘suggestive of different shades of masculinity,’ wrote Vogue’s Tiziana Cardini. “Marking the first full MM6 men’s show, the clothes reimagined traditional masculine archetypes with a distinct Margiela twist. Linen was coated and rubberized to mimic black leather; a tuxedo suit was crafted in tinsel-y turquoise lurex tearing open at the seams (“precious but also fucked up”), and black denim was airbrushed to give the effect of being lit sideways by a fading spotlight.”
