This week, a look at some of the international brands descending on Florence for this season’s Pitti Uomo. The event has increasingly cultivated a larger number of non-Italian and non-European brands, many of which are using the event to get a deeper foothold in the valuable European market.
Pitti Immagine Uomo, the menswear trade show held twice a year in Florence, kicked off this week. And this year is continuing a trend that began in 2024: Pitti is becoming more international.
The January event had 20,000 attendees, and compared to June 2024, the number of attendees from outside of Italy increased by 6.5%. There was double-digit growth in the number of buyers from Spain, Japan, Belgium and the United States.
For international brands, Pitti is a great way to reach a new audience, make connections with buyers from wholesalers around the world — not just in Italy — and get a feel for what the competition is doing.
“We’ve changed our collection quite a lot since Covid,” said Christian Fenske, creative director of the German luxury menswear brand Dressler. “We’ve become much more contemporary, with more casual suits and knits. We stopped doing outerwear and knitwear during the pandemic, and now we’re reintroducing it. So Pitti is a great place to show what we can do.”
Dressler is carried in over 350 stores around the world, mostly in central Europe. But Fenske said increasing the brand’s visibility and marketing is a major priority, and Pitti is a step toward that.
For American brands, Pitti is also a stepping stone into the broader European market. Faherty, an American luxury beachwear brand, has only dipped its toes into Europe with a shop-in-shop at Spanish department store El Corte Ingles earlier this year. Co-founder and creative director Mike Faherty said the soon-to-be eight shop-in-shops it has with El Corte Ingles gave him the confidence that there’s a real opportunity for American brands in Europe.
Now, Faherty is doing its first Pitti exhibition this week as it seeks to expand even further into Europe.
“This is part of our future,” Mike Faherty said. “I’m seeing our wholesale partners like Bloomingdale’s here, but I’m also meeting with European wholesalers, and I’ll be cruising around to see what the other brands are up to.”
Faherty said his approach to building a European business, which he hopes will make up 20% of the overall business in the next 10 years, will mirror the way he and co-founder Alex Faherty built the brand in the U.S. Wholesale will be the primary driver in building awareness until there’s enough demand to establish direct channels. Faherty’s annual revenue is in the high nine figures.
Another American brand, Filson, used Pitti to expand in Europe five years ago. Filson makes rugged, premium outdoorsy American workwear.
“It was almost a counter-intuitive move for us,” said Alex Carleton, Filson’s creative director. “But one of our European distributors was adamant about the potential demand for the brand in Europe. Now we have a flagship store in Milan. It revealed that there was much more demand than we had previously anticipated within the E.U.”
Filson doesn’t report specific revenue figures, but its annual revenue has grown 40% over the last five years and it has over 300 wholesale partners around the world. Italian retailer WP Lavori owns a 10% share of Filson.
Carleton said the European market, particularly in luxury and in menswear, has an appetite for authentic American brands that aren’t trying to adopt European aesthetics. Ralph Lauren is a perfect example of a brand that has successfully made inroads around the globe without foregoing its American heritage roots. In Ralph Lauren’s most recent earnings report from May, it showed that Europe led its sales growth, with 16% increased sales, compared to a 6% growth in North America.
All three brands Glossy spoke to for this story mentioned that the menswear industry is, like much of fashion, bifurcating. Increasingly, premium and luxury brands are increasing their prices and chasing more affluent consumers, while mass-market brands are being pushed lower by fast fashion. For brands like Filson and Faherty, whose prices range in the low hundreds, trade shows like Pitti Uomo can be a way to reach prestigious European retailers and further position themselves on the more premium side of that divide.
Executive moves
The biggest hire of the week was Luca de Meo taking over as the CEO of Kering from Francois-Henri Pinault. De Meo is an unusual choice, coming not from fashion but from the world of automotive. He most recently served as CEO of Renault since 2020, after previously holding leadership positions at Fiat Group and Volkswagen Group. His appointment at Kering, while raising some eyebrows, has also inspired investor confidence that he can bring a “fresh vision” to the struggling luxury group.
Kering has seen its stock price fall by 78% since 2021 as revenue has declined at some of its biggest brands. New leadership changes at Gucci, which makes up nearly half of Kering’s revenue, along with de Meo’s appointment, are meant to shake up a company that needs to strengthen its position against LVMH, Prada, Hermès and other competitors.
News to know
- FIFA, the international governing body of soccer, announced this week that it is debuting its own “functional luxury” line of womenswear called FIFA 1904. While it’s far from uncommon for luxury fashion and sports to cross over, it’s rare to see a fashion line launched not by an athlete, a team or even a league, but by a sports governance organization.
- In other fashion and soccer news, Louis Vuitton signed an exclusive partnership with one of the most prestigious and decorated clubs in international soccer, Real Madrid. Louis Vuitton will provide formalwear, luggage and accessories for the entire team just in time for the FIFA Club World Cup, which began earlier this week.
- IRL brand events typically take the form of a pop-up shop or a performance. But this week, Hermès hosted something closer to an escape room. In six rooms filled with Hermès products at Pier 36 in Manhattan, attendees were tasked with finding six missing horses – a nod to Hermès’s equestrian roots. 25,000 people have already signed up to try it, the brand said.
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