IN FLORENCE, BOYS WILL BE MEN
Though billed for gender blur vogue, Pitti Uomo adheres to traditional archetypes
FOR his debut at Pitti Uomo, the twice-yearly menswear trade fair that draws 1,222 brands and accounts for an overwhelming portion (some say as much as 80 percent) of the sales volume in this particular and expanding part of the fashion business, Matteo Martini dressed with fastidious care.
He wore a pair of white summer jeans with rolled cuffs, a custom-tailored white buttondown shirt from the Robert Friedman label, left untucked. Over it he wore a mid-gray superlightweight wool blazer with a notched lapel.
To accessorize, he selected a chunky Swatch wristwatch from a growing collection and a pair of royal blue Adidas trainers with yellow stripes. He styled his hair himself with a side part, lightly gelled. Tucked into his breast pocket, a pink-piped white pocket square signaled to an observer his assured sense of style and fashion.
Unlike most of the 30,000 others who attended the fair, he came with his mother. Obviously, it could not be otherwise: Matteo is 6.
Although in miniature, Matteo was attired not unlike most of those who attend Pitti Uomo — that is, those likely to go through life comfortably embracing the masculine pronoun. He looked the way, traditionally, we have become used to men looking, albeit one who stands a shade under 4 feet.
An event like Pitti Uomo seems like such an obvious laboratory for the study of evolving gender archetypes that it is a wonder the place isn’t crawling with academics and social anthropologists.
Instead, during a week in January and again in June, Florence is overrun with men who identify as men demonstrating to their fellow men their current notion of how a man of today ought to look.
Sometimes the results are quite silly. Sometimes they are ineffably stylish. Sometimes they betray the ornate workings of an individual psyche, and sometimes they challenge basic assumptions we all tend to have about what is suitable to wear outside the confines of one’s home.
Yet seldom does anyone at Pitti Uomo appear to question traditional gender binaries. If a guy happens to show up here wearing a kilt, you can bet he will have balanced the look with some lavish chin whiskers just to underscore the presence of his Y chromosome.
“Look, you don’t go to the hardware store for oranges,” said retailer and Instagram star Nick Wooster, standing in a booth representing the Italian tailoring label Lardini, for which he has served as a consultant and designer for the past several years.
“It’s a menswear trade fair,” Wooster added, noting that in another few days, the fashion flock will move on to Milan and Paris, where — at least for now — fashion houses, led by Gucci, are scrambling to get in on the gender-blur vogue.
“Talk to me about gender in another two weeks,” Wooster said before walking a reporter through his latest collection, which, while it subjected traditional Italian tailoring to a certain feminization — peplums, twin sets, boucle knits from the mill that produces Chanel woolens — it hardly tested the limits of what constitutes masculine attire.
“This is my señora moment, triple señora,” Wooster said facetiously, pointing out elements that included a pair of baggy shorts that resembled culottes. “I’m not going to lie. Because of Gucci and Bruce — or, rather, Caitlyn — Jenner, we’re having this conversation. But, at the end of the day, guys want to be guys.”
What is almost perverse about the routine cultural reading of the ways guys have dipped into fashions that at first glance look like feminizing choices is the obliviousness to how often the ones they settle on originated in archaic macho archetypes.
Samurai warriors (and sumo wrestlers) favored topknots, or man buns, as Anja Aronowsky Cronberg, editor-in-chief of Vestoj, a scholarly journal about fashion, pointed out in an email. Scottish warriors wore kilts. Blackbeard rocked an earring.
“Women have had a much easier time adopting masculine-coded garments, than men embracing potent feminine symbols,” Cronberg wrote.
Whether from Japan or South Korea or Romania or Australia, the men here have in common with 6-year-old Matteo Martini a tropism toward traditional forms of masculine presentation.
“It’s easy for girls to dress like guys,” said Jared Acquaro, a tailor and blogger who had flown here from Melbourne, Australia, drawn, as many are, by the fact that this fair remains ground zero for menswear.
“For guys, it’s not really so interesting in the end to wear girls’ clothes,” said Acquaro, 33, whose outfit was perhaps, by conventional standards, a mite feminine: pale blue linen trousers and vest, jaunty newsboy cap, leather-handled tote bag in marine blue.
“At Pitti, people who are into fashion, who are passionate about it,” can dress a bit more outrageously, he said.
“You can pull it off here,” he said, and yet notably few made any effort to do so. In the macho culture he comes from, added Acquaro, who is also lavishly tattooed, gender role play has yet to gain traction.
“The cross-dressing thing is not so interesting,” he said. “People are still into dressing quite masculine.”