Pink, Green and Ivory Medallion and Paisley Double Sided Pocket Square
$69
MAB and the St. Regis Florence, featuring Dormeuil
Every Pitti Uomo, we find our way back to our Florentine home, The St. Regis, for our creative black tie [un]official kickoff party. This June, we celebrated our 20th anniversary, and the reveal of our lookbook in collaboration with Dormeuil, Twenty Looks. Twenty Years.
What is Pitti Uomo
For one week each season, Florence fills with the people who influence, make, sell, and photograph men’s clothing, and the fair at the center of it, Pitti Uomo, takes over the historic Fortezza da Basso. From the outside it reads as a trade show, rows of booths and buyers. We don’t come to shop. We come to learn, to collaborate, and to carry a sharper point of view back to the studio, where it turns up in what we put our clients in over the year that follows. This time, we had a second reason to be there.
The [un]official Opening Ceremony
This June the occasion was bigger than usual. We turned twenty, and marked it the way it deserved, with Dormeuil, twenty influential friends, colleagues, and partners, a lookbook worth the wait, and one hell of a party.
Twenty years ago, we opened in a basement with a short list of clients who trusted us. Twenty years on, the circle around the work has grown well beyond that first roster, enough to fill the Winter Garden at The St. Regis Florence. Michael Andrews Bespoke has always run on relationships, with our clients, our craftspeople, our partners, and the mills whose cloth gives the work its foundation. Few have mattered more than Dormeuil, a defining cloth house since 1842, known for its fabrics, its technical work, and a point of view that has outlasted every trend since. We’ve leaned on the breadth and consistency of their collections for two decades. For our 20th anniversary, they gave us twenty cuts from across those collections, each a different corner of what the house can do. We drafted, cut, and fitted twenty bespoke looks from them, one each for twenty people who make up our world: team, clients, collaborators, and a few friends who have watched the whole thing happen, women and men alike.
Many of the twenty came dressed in the looks we’d made for them, so the lookbook spent the evening on people instead of paper. Rikesh Chauhan, the photographer and videographer behind much of this campaign, wore his and spent the night moving between the front of a camera and the back of one. Derrick Brownie wore his. So did Fabio Attanasio. Brian Sacawa of He Spoke Style, who co-hosted the night with us and has shot, written, and styled his way to an audience past a million, wore a beautiful terracotta dinner jacket from Dormeuil’s La Croisette collection.
Prints of the looks lined the walls, and at the center of the room Dormeuil unveiled a length of Extreme Vicuña, the rarest cloth in their collection, and let guests put their hands on it. The St. Regis Florence team ran the evening the way they run everything, quietly and without a seam showing. Their orchestra played through the night, and at one point Brian traded his drink for a saxophone and sat in. Guests found a custom pocket square waiting in their rooms. The night ended over a long dinner. Nobody seemed in a hurry to leave.
The cocktails were the Italian Riviera in a glass, in Florence. A twentieth-anniversary night opening Pitti Uomo 110 wanted a gin with a story to match, so Portofino Dry Gin poured the aperitivo: juniper, lemon, and Ligurian herbs from the hills above the harbor. A custom tailor from New York and a small distillery from the coast, both working from the same idea, that craft and hospitality are one gesture. Ferrari Trento poured the toast to twenty years
Our official photos and videos were shot and edited by Rikesh Chauhan and Anton Welcome, who spent the night reading the room and catching the parts of it the rest of us were too busy enjoying to notice. We’re grateful to them both.
By now the Pitti crowd has headed home. The twenty suits have been packed carefully in suitcases and flown home to New York and London and wherever else, headed for weddings, galas, and ordinary Tuesdays that have nothing to do with Pitti. That’s the part a party can’t sell you. A look is for one night. A suit for life’s moments, big and small, is the reason anyone keeps doing this for twenty years.
