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Pitti Immagine Uomo, the world’s leading menswear trade fair, opened in Florence on June 16 and runs through June 19, with 45 British menswear brands showing alongside Simone Rocha’s first standalone menswear show.
Craig Green showed at dusk in the Boboli Gardens in 2019. Grace Wales Bonner lined the Palazzo Medici Riccardi with an installation by Ibrahim Mahama in 2022. Martine Rose turned an ancient marketplace into an Italo-disco nightclub in 2023. The guest designer slot at Pitti Uomo has a way of producing moments that outlast the season, and this June, it belongs to Simone Rocha.
Rocha is the guest of honour at Pitti Uomo 110, the world’s most important menswear trade fair, running June 16 to 19 at the Fortezza da Basso in Florence. It’s her first-ever standalone menswear show at the Teatro della Pergola, a 17th-century theatre that has been staging opera since 1656.
That she is the first designer in this run of British and London-based Pitti guests to do so specifically as a menswear-only proposition feels significant. Wales Bonner, Green, Rose, Jonathan Anderson, before them. The list has been quietly building a case for what London produces, and Rocha is the latest and most pointed addition to it.
Her menswear has been present in her runway shows for a few seasons. Ruffled rugby tops, bead-embellished suiting, a belted fishtail parka. Lace-trimmed shirting next to padded outerwear. Embroidered suits cut with enough structure to hold their shape and enough softness to feel lived in.
What Rocha does, and has always done, is make clothes that carry emotional weight without announcing it. The collection in Florence draws from Ireland, Hong Kong, art, and family. The same sources she has always returned to, pushed now into a space where they only have menswear to fill.
She told the Italian publication MilanoFinanza that Florence made her feel like a guest in a new city in the best possible way. For a designer who has shown at the Old Bailey and Alexandra Palace, that is not a small thing to say. She came ready to be changed by the room.
Across the Fortezza, William Palmer is doing something nobody else at this fair is doing. Palmer won the I:C Pitti Immagine Award at the ITS International Talent Support competition in Trieste this year, which is how he ended up in the Sala delle Nazioni with an installation called “The Brief Exposure.” He turned it into a British bus stop. Not a reference to one, not an abstraction of one.
A bus stop, inside one of Italy’s great historic fortresses, at a fair that runs on the grammar of fine tailoring and heritage outerwear. The work carries what Palmer describes as the humour and directness of British working-class life. It is funny, and it is pointed, and it does not explain itself, which is exactly right.
Two London-connected designers at the same edition of Pitti Uomo. Neither of them doing what anyone expected.
The 45 UK brands on the exhibition floor, brought to Florence by the UK Fashion and Textile Association (UKFT), are doing the work that makes the rest of it possible. Barbour, Baracuta, Crockett and Jones, Charles Tyrwhitt, and Joseph Cheaney, alongside newer labels. The group spans heritage shoemaking and technical outerwear through to emerging design, and Florence is the right market for all of it.
This is a city that understands what craft costs and why anyone would pay it. International buyers from Japan, the US, Korea, and across Europe come to Pitti Uomo precisely because the floor has that kind of range, and the UK contingent has been growing into that expectation for years. The Department for Business and Trade backs the UKFT’s presence here. Getting 45 brands positioned correctly in front of the right buyers is not glamorous work. It is what makes the whole thing function.
Pitti Uomo 110 drew 720 exhibitors, 44 percent from outside Italy. The fair’s theme this season is “The Pool,” developed by SSAW Magazine’s Chris Vidal Tenomaa and Tuomas Laitinen, pulling from the myth of Narcissus and the visual world of David Hockney. Identity. Desire. Reflection. The British contingent landed in that conversation with more range than any single theme can hold. Rocha’s ceremonial tenderness, Palmer’s bus stop, Barbour’s century-old wax cotton. None of it needs the theme to make sense. All of it, somehow, does.
British menswear has never been easy to summarise, which is probably why it keeps producing work that is worth looking at. Florence noticed a long time ago. This week, it is paying close attention.
Cheaney, Crockett and Jones, Edward Green, Loake, Mallet, Mou, Sanders, Walsh, Zyphor
Barbour, Baracuta, Douglas Hayward, Griffin, Harris Wharf London, Invertere, Mackintosh, Private White VC, Walker Slater, Wax London
Frescobol Carioca, Kangol, Lyle & Scott, Orlebar Brown, Original Penguin, Rules of Faith, Seeing Red, Superdry, Weekend Offender
Charles Tyrwhitt, Thomas Pink
Jamieson’s of Shetland, John Smedley
Lock & Co. Hatters
Beorma, Carl Friedrik, Croots England, Equipement De Vie, Hardy & Parsons
Babette Wasserman London, Elizabeth Parker, Fox Umbrellas, Oscar Deen, Pampeano, Tateossian London, Tateossian for Lamborghini
Discothèque
Pitti Uomo 110 runs from 16 to 19 June 2026 at the Fortezza da Basso, Florence.
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