Luca Magliano
Is Torching the
Past to Find
the Future

On a brisk Wednesday morning on the outskirts of Florence, Luca Magliano is stewing over these questions, a Bic lighter resting in one hand while the other compulsively snaps a rubber band.

He is this season’s guest designer at Pitti Uomo, a centerpiece position held recently by the likes of Eli Russell Linnetz, Martine Rose, and Grace Wales Bonner. In 2017, not long after graduating from Bologna’s Libera Università delle Arti, Magliano was recognized by Vogue Italia’s contest Who Is on Next? Uomo. The following year he made his Pitti Uomo debut, sparking a momentous rise highlighted in 2023 with the award of LVMH’s Karl Lagerfeld Prize. His return to the famous menswear exhibition this season is something of a homecoming for his eponymous brand—one that has caused his moment of meditation and reflection.

Known for combining shrewd Italian tailoring with stylish workwear (a nod to his blue-collar roots), Magliano’s previous collections ranged from explorations of 1980s Italian paninari to forward-thinking commentary on classism and sexuality.

Inside an empty indoor concert arena tuned to thumping rave music, the models dressed in the new collection carefully stepped their way down a coliseum-like staircase, descending from the stadium’s upper bowl to the venue’s floor. The set design is an homage to Andrei Tarkovsky’s 1983 film Nostalghia, which features a climatic scene set against the backdrop of a towering, Roman marble staircase.

“I love popular movies,” Magliano says while referencing the Russian director’s penultimate feature, as if to downplay any associations with the snooty Letterboxd crowd. “But Tarkovsky. . .” His eyes glaze over as he begins substituting words with impassioned hand gestures.

So what is Magliano’s answer to our love-hate relationship with nostalgia? He’s a better artist than to explain outright, but the collection’s new explorations suggest that the antidote is love and romance—the in-person, immediate kind, not the vision in one’s head.

For FW24, the brand introduces its most gender-fluid silhouettes to date, weaving them alongside the classic takes on masculine tailoring Magliano has become known for.

“Fluid is our way to evoke eras,” he explains. “There is an erotic connection between the clothes. Being fluid is also naturally political. It’s impossible to put on a show while ignoring what’s going on [in the world].”

Alongside square-toed boots and chic dress shoes, the collection’s centerpiece footwear is a pair of everyman safety shoes made in partnership with Italian workwear brand U-Power.

“It’s a sort of sabotage,” Magliano says, both about the shoes and the way he seeks to pull outside pieces into the Magliano world, reinventing them in the process.

Juxtapositions of high-fashion and workwear are a common throughline at the brand. Graphic T-shirts and chunky knitwear from the new collection are layered atop jackets and tailored pieces and vice-versa—an interchange between the model’s visible outer shells. Graffitied, plastic bag-like accessories were carried hand-in-hand with quintessential Italian leather totes.

Models wore headpieces ranging from beret-like caps to off-kilter, pointed birthday party hats—both made in collaboration with Italian hatmaker Borsalino.

“It’s obviously ironic,” he says of the party hats—another instance of collaborative sabotage. “But they are still tailored and made with the finest materials. In order to subvert you first have to understand.”

Following the collection’s more manic portrayals of classic tailoring, the show closed with a trio of exquisitely designed suits—a black-and-white set designed in collaboration with Kiton (a partnership Magliano says has been a dream of his).

The third suited look, with a fiery, all-red undershirt, made its way down the daunting runway stairs. The look was perhaps another nod to Nostalghia, in particular when the film’s misunderstood zealot protagonist delivers a climatic speech on brotherhood atop a statue of Marcus Aurelius at the base of the staircase before dousing himself in kerosene and burning himself alive.

“Nostalgia isn’t a passive feeling,” Magliano offers, getting as close to spilling the beans on the show’s thesis as he’ll allow. “It’s a process. It encourages us to choose radical solutions, and do whatever needs to be done.”