Ahead of Simone Rocha’s Pitti Uomo Debut, Take a Look Back at Iconic Pitti Guest Shows

Reported by Vogue.

Florence in June means one thing for fashion: Pitti Uomo, the Florentine trade fair that officially opens the menswear season and has, over decades, quietly become one of the most creatively charged stops on the calendar. While the broader industry is still recovering from resort season, the city fills up fast — with buyers, editors, and enough street style energy to fuel an entire mood board. This year's edition arrives with particular momentum, according to Vogue.

The headliner is Simone Rocha, who has been weaving menswear into her collections since 2022 but is taking the Pitti stage for her first-ever standalone men's show. "So far the menswear has been very hand-in-hand with the womenswear," she told Vogue's Luke Leitch. "Now I feel ready for it to stand on its own and be its own proposition." She'll be joined by DSM Kei Ninomiya (Dover Street Market's experimental imprint) and Jiyong Kim, a 2024 LVMH Prize semifinalist — a guest lineup that signals Pitti is leaning hard into designers who resist easy categorization.

A Legacy Built on One-Off Spectacles

The guest designer tradition dates to the 1990s, when Pitti began inviting global names to stage standalone shows alongside its trade exhibitions. As Pitti's director of communications and events, Lapo Cianchi, explained in 2022: it transforms the fair from a commercial transaction into something with genuine cultural stakes. That mandate has produced some genuinely unforgettable moments. Raf Simons showed up four times — most memorably in 2017, just post-Dior, with a collection soaked in Mapplethorpe Foundation photography, every single look bearing a print. Vivienne Westwood, one of the first official guests, sent 18th-century aristocrats down the runway in floral brocade and shredded denim back in 1991. Undercover and The Soloist shared the stage in 2018 for a Kubrick-tinged, post-apocalyptic double bill that — in retrospect — predicted where menswear's anxious imagination was heading. More recently, MM6 Margiela staged a slick all-black showing for fall 2025, rubberizing linen to mimic leather and splitting tuxedo seams open in lurex — "precious but also fucked up," per the brand's own description.

The roster of past guests also includes Maison Margiela, Dries Van Noten, Yohji Yamamoto, Marine Serre, and Grace Wales Bonner — now named creative director of Hermès menswear — alongside cult moments like Finnish poker-player-turned-designer Rolf Ekroth bringing anime-motif outerwear and helmeted models playing table hockey to the Finnish Pavilion in 2019. Pitti rewards the specific and the strange.

With Simone Rocha stepping into her own menswear chapter on one of fashion's most storied guest stages, the real question isn't whether she belongs there — it's what she's been holding back for exactly this moment.

Read the original at Vogue.