Forgive me dear reader for writing about Pitti, but so many people have asked about it since the summer edition last week – both industry people and, perhaps surprisingly, readers – that it seemed worthwhile.
The news isn’t good. There are fewer brands and some buildings remain closed. One London shop we all know said that since Covid, five of their suppliers have stopped showing and now are only in Milan. The Armoury only had Alan there, when they used to send a squad.
The Wednesday was busy, but Thursday was quiet, and Friday was dead. Friday has always been an odd one, with brands trying to work out how soon they could start closing down their booth, but this was the first time everything just shut down early, apparently. Two agents we know left on the Thursday evening, knowing this was coming.
Yet the parties are getting bigger and bigger. At the Wm Brown drinks on Wednesday evening, they had to pre-mix negronis to try and keep up with demand. There was still a 20-minute wait to get a drink, and it actually became a cash bar at 8 o’clock, at which point the place thinned out suspiciously.
I love these parties; they’re great fun. My favourite is the drinks on Thursday night organised by Jake Mueser and Maximilian Mogg, where a couple of hundred people attempt to squeeze onto a narrow street, and cheer the cars that try to drive through them.
The problem is, these are all work events for me and many others, and if they stop making sense from a work point of view, I won’t be able to come – or maybe come for only one day. I’ll go to Milan or Paris instead.
If the Japanese and Americans I want to meet don’t go, then I’ll stop coming. I’d suggest that if people like me stop going, some others that want to meet me and tell me about their brand, will also stop. The layers peel away until only the tourists are left.
A friend likened the situation to a dead whale floating to the bottom of the ocean. The animals that feed on the carcass are having a great time, but the whale is dead, and at some point it will all be gone.
This is too harsh: the whale isn’t dead yet. But there seem to be fundamental problems with the fair, disguised online by a blizzard of cocktail-drinking.
Talking of photos, it’s easy to forget that the more important photography has also slowly disappeared. Big magazines no longer want Pitti street-style photos as much, and so there are fewer photographers. There are fewer people posing to have their photo taken as a result: it’s the same vicious cycle as between brands and buyers.
And while it’s easy to mock the posing peacocks, I know so many readers that enjoyed seeing what their favourite people were wearing to Pitti. I still post a photo each day, because people ask, and I’d like to see everyone else’s as well.
“Pitti used to be good for two things,” a magazine editor told me this week. “There was always a little brand you discovered – some French pyjama maker or something equally obscure – and you could do trend pieces based on what everyone was wearing.
“Both of those things have disappeared. The brands are all the same, with generally lower quality. And there are fewer really stylish people going, so the big trend feature we used to do no longer works.”
I’ve seen these trends myself in the past 11 years. When I first went, the biggest party was drinks at Liverano & Liverano. There were maybe a hundred people, a great band, and everyone in there was a hero I wanted to talk to.
It used to be even better still. At the Mueser/Mogg evening I spent a good half hour chatting to an Italian cloth agent who first came in 1984 (as I said, these are work events – not just chatting to friends). He talked of the little booths containing Kiton, Attolini and Brioni, with the founders themselves there. I wish I had a time machine and could go see it all.
Pitti is still, of course, wonderful. If I compare it to the industry events I used to go to in my previous life, it’s a hell of a lot more glamorous and fun – and more fun than buying in Paris or Milan, or cloth fairs like Unica (above).
But to me it feels like something has to change, before the whale actually dies. If I was involved in Pitti I would try to bring more of the events and brands closer to the fair. I’d give them free spaces to hold events, and give deals to makers (and there are a lot of them) that show in hotel suites outside, inside.
Pitti flies people over to cover the fair and puts on events, like the Paul Smith one this time. But there’s no point bringing people over if there’s nothing to see. And shows like the Paul Smith one are a one-off. It needs substance before marketing.
Perhaps it would be nice if it were set up like a festival. Somewhere that customers and buyers were welcome but it was clearly a show, a place to show off your brand. A clean break with the idea of it being about wholesale and writing orders. Florence is an incredible location that everyone wants to go to – the concept of Pitti just has to make sense.
Street shots courtesy Maximilian Mogg. Normal non-industry business will be resumed in full force next week
