Magliano's elegance on display at Pitti Uomo

A faint halo of light shone at the top of a monumental staircase. In the gloom, the models emerged from a cinematic veil of fog and walked slowly up seemingly endless steps until they reached the stage in the large Forum Nelson Mandela concert and sports hall, and strolled among the spectators. On Wednesday night, Magliano hosted a high-impact show in Florence, presenting a rich and sophisticated Fall/Winter 2024-25 collection.

The decoration of the staircase gave the Bolognese designer Luca Magliano the opportunity to adopt a glamorous register, starting from “the notion of a romantic encounter” inspired by Nostalgia, Andrei Tarkovsky's film filmed in Italy. He imagined a vaguely vague atmosphere, within which floated a cast of disparate characters. From a homeless man dressed in old, shapeless sweaters, patched clothes and a plastic bag, to a late-night reveler in ruby ​​red velvet mules, black sequin pants and a mohair jacquard sweater with a large white cat embroidered on it.

They were joined on stage by a mechanic in a worn and stained denim overalls, a rocker guy in a vest adorned with pins and brooches, a tough guy character flaunting his virile and sensual attitude in baggy leather pants and a sleeveless t-shirt peeking out from under a raglan-sleeved sweater, and dandy types with a long cashmere coat and a striped double-breasted suit, or with an all-white total look. In the latter case, the suit was worn by a woman and combined with black sneakers and a bandeau top that covered her chest.

The collection included many feminine looks that Luca Magliano had started presenting a few seasons ago. He said that “we have to admire women for their style, their elegance. I think that classic style is synonymous with a kind of hyperfemininity that can also happen the other way around. My women wear suits over a flattened bust. The contemporary body cannot be binary. Gender is a landscape, a journey, within which different identities have needs that they must be able to express through fashion.”

In January 2018, Luca Magliano presented his first show Pitti Uomo, after being recognized in the Who Is On Next? menswear awards in 2017. Six years later, with the Karl Lagerfeld award he won at the 2023 LVMH Prize under his belt, he is back in Florence as Pitti Uomo's guest designer. This exhibition has fully confirmed the potential glimpsed earlier in his career, exhibiting a coherent style that has been strengthened and purified over the years.

Since its inception, the Magliano label has developed around two central themes: body and gender identity issues, and popular culture. Luca Magliano highlighted that “beauty is an anti-fascist word” and added that “we have adopted as a reference point a type of elegance”, the elegance of the marginalized. “This is the social and political aspect of what we are doing,” said the designer, who has reinterpreted classic men's garments with great care and a true passion for Italian tailoring.

Proof of this are the new collaborations that it has presented at the show with two icons of Italian style: the wonderful tailored jackets typical of the Neapolitan sartorial tradition, handmade by Kiton, and five models of Borsalino hats, playfully remodeled as cheerful and pointed partying. touched. “It's kind of a cute trick,” said Luca Magliano, who has always wanted to change and subvert fashion codes.

She studied at the Libera Università delle Arti, an art college in her hometown of Bologna, before getting into fashion with an internship at Alessandro Dell'Acqua. In 2016, she launched the Magliano menswear line, backed by Arcari & Co., a long-established Italian textile producer from Faenza. The brand is currently distributed through 70 multi-brand retailers, mainly in China, South Korea, Japan and Europe, especially Italy.

In January 2023, he boosted his organization by joining forces with Underscore District, a fashion startup accelerator specializing in digital solutions led by Edoardo Di Luzio, and launching the brand's e-store. He also created the company Magliano srl, in which the two partners had equal shares and Arcari was a minority shareholder.