As the onset of dusk began to lower the temperature just a little in Pitti last night, the Issey Miyake sub-brand Homme Plissé took its first step on what promises to be a peripatetic voyage of inspiration.
Founded by the late Issey Miyake in 2013, the brand began showing on the Paris menswear calendar in 2019. In January this year, however, Plissé’s place in the Parisian sun was handed to the newer Miyake sub-brand (of which there seem to be many), IM Men. Which is why the Homme Plissé team touched down in Florence. Going forward, the brand will adopt a nomadic schedule of self-presentation, rambling here and there to connect with local markets and explore new forms of self-expression as it sees fit.
This collectsion was shown in the garden of the Villa Medicea della Petraia, a fine old house in the hills outside of the city. Before it started visitors were treated to an exhibition in the building’s covered courtyard that contextualized the collectsion as the result of a team research trip around Italy. The color of lemons and tomatoes, the process of painting, and the art of traveling light were all alluded to, first in the display and then second on the runway.
The mixed paint facemasks, paintbrush pockets, and outerwear pieces with integrated coathangers were all whimsical allusions back to that research process. So too were the abundant juicy shades in which some of these typically fluid Homme Plissé pieces were presented. Shown on the gravel paths of the villa’s ornamental garden, the show saw the models crunch a route way between islands of sun-parched lawn. Serendipitously, a system of sprinklers opened up mid-way into the show: this trick generated refracted rainbows in the summer air. Along the way, there seemed to be a few Medici-related renaissance allusions dropped in—deconstructed breeches, jerkins, and smocks—as well as patterns based on a creatively mixed-up palette.
The Homme Plissé models walked the finale just at the beginning of sunset, heading off towards the who-knows-where and when of this brand’s next chapter of self-expression.
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