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While London flexes its menswear muscles at LCM, it’s business as usual at Pitti down south. For decades, the Florentine menswear fair has plucked out young designers from near and far and given them the few but highly coveted slots on its show schedule. This season the honour befell young Swede Erik Bjerkesjö, who took out a smoke-filled Villa Favard to present at Pitti. The minimalism-crazed designers of Scandinavia needn’t look far for clean-cut inspiration and in the case of Bjerkesjö, it was Ingmar Bergman – the legendary Swedish director, who brought us Through a Glass Darkly – who played muse. The almost fetishised austerity of his darkly formal collection could, however, just as well have come courtesy of Bergman’s Italian counterpart Visconti, and the bright, gilded ballrooms of the Villa Favard certainly backed up that idea. A series of white-shirt-and-black-trouser exits slowly morphed into something more detailed: zips started appearing at the hems of the trousers, apron-y waist accessories turned up, and it all transformed into a structural affair, which was pretty much porn for puritans.
Text: Anders Christian Madsen
Photography: Magnus Klackenstam
