Over the last 10 years Massimo Giorgetti has built a label now that boasts 33 stores, 200 menswear accounts, and 600 womenswear, and which seems pretty well set for the future. His ultimately unspectacular tenure at Pucci aside—a difficult period that coincided with the death of his father and left him spread way too thin creatively—Giorgetti has emerged from his first decade in the business as one of the most successful self-starting fashion entrepreneurs of his generation.
This Pitti show was an anniversary shindig, for sure— Giorgetti credits his Florentine runway debut back in 2013 as being the key factor in kickstarting his menswear business—but it was not a retrospective. He said: “The collection is six months of work, and there is nothing archival—no looking back.” Its spirit was informed by the exuberantly sybaritic beach and club lifestyle of Giorgetti’s Adriatic coast home turf, and climaxed with a finale in which the models walked en masse in dampened shirts and scanty briefs from the brand’s new underwear line. Hotly glowing phones aplenty rose aloft in appreciation. The clothes worn outside those briefs were a carefully crafted and loudly projected mix of very much.
Boxy, loose, high-lapelled three button jackets reminiscent both of the silhouette we saw at Givenchy last night and at Versace in the 1990s and intermittently since were worn above soft cargo pocket pants or shorts. Camp collar shirts in lobster, poppy, or bandana paisley prints were mashed against pants and track jackets in lividly clashing two-tone leopard print. Sebago boat shoes and linen blousons and shorts featured naive graphics and heartfelt scrawled messages of summer love. A collaboration with the painter Norbert Bisky produced an attractive fractured portrait used as prints on shirting, shorts, and perforated nylon vests or in panels on the tailoring. Especially inventive were the denim pieces bleached to create a pattern reminiscent of the dappled azure water in sunlight. There was a longish section of richly colored tie-dye denim looks near the end whose attractive fade and idiosyncratic pattern illustrated the hand-made aspect that Giorgetti is so keen to telegraph in his clothes at the moment. These looks were sometimes punctuated by others in which the models wore their Filas strung around their necks just to ensure we got the message about that collaboration.
Giorgetti said: “I'm also especially proud because I think MSGM is maybe the only contemporary brand in which everything is 100 percent made in Italy: it’s all done between Milano, Rimini, and Ancona, which makes me very happy.” The result of 10 years’ hard labor, this was an easy-to-love, endless summer of a collection.
