Another brand is abandoning the traditional fashion show calendar.
On Friday Brioni, the Italian luxury tailor, announced it would hold its next show — the first by its new creative director, Justin O’Shea — on July 4 in Paris during the women’s couture season, dumping its usual June Milan men’s wear slot.
Brioni is the third label owned by the Kering Group to reveal that it will no longer be playing by the old calendar rules. In April, Gucci said that in 2017, it would unite its men’s and women’s collections in a single show, most likely during the women’s wear season, and earlier this week, Bottega Veneta said it would hold a joint show this September in honor of its 50th birthday.
These followed similar announcements from Burberry, Tom Ford, Vetements and Public School, all of which are wreaking havoc with fashion’s former twice-a-year, four-city cycle of shows for men’s and women’s wear. The calendar is not cast in stone anymore. But no one is quite sure how it is all going to end.
“We are in a time of great experimentation,” said Carlo Capasa, president of the Camera Nazionale della Moda Italiana, the Italian chamber of fashion, which administers fashion weeks. “Lots of brands are trying different approaches to see what is most effective.”
Mr. Capasa then professed not to be concerned that brands were abandoning men’s fashion week.
Still, Brioni’s move is particularly significant, for two reasons.
First, as Mr. O’Shea’s debut, the show will be closely watched, in part because Mr. O’Shea’s background is merchandising, not designing. Before joining Brioni, he was fashion director for the website mytheresa.com. He was a nontraditional hire at a time of creative director flux, and his success or failure will be used as ammunition in the debate over how much real designers matter to fashion brands.
And second, the show will not be a one-time experiment, but the beginning of a new approach to showing for Brioni.
“We aren’t a fashion brand, so we don’t need to mimic fashion,” Gianluca Flore, chief executive of Brioni, said in explaining the new system. “We are a style brand, so we are going to follow the customers.”
The planned couture show is nominally linked to the opening of the refurbished Brioni flagship store in Paris, where the collection will be held. It also, however, reflects a very specific positioning of Brioni’s made-to-measure business as the men’s wear equivalent of made-to-order couture (albeit at a slightly lower price point). Indeed, Mr. Flore refers to it as “pre-a-couture,” and immediately after the show, special runway looks (“the ones for our ‘little prince’ customers — we have a lot of them,” Mr. Flore said) will be available for customers to order.
Meanwhile, Mr. Flore said Brioni planned to hold its next show in November in New York, to coincide with the opening of another renovated store. Both the July collection and the November one are to be delivered to customers a few weeks after the events, in part to facilitate a turnover of stock, and the replacement of Brioni’s former aesthetic (created by the designer Brendan Mullane) with Mr. O’Shea’s aesthetic. Whatever that may be.
(Mr. Flore gave a few hints: It won’t look that different, but there might be some more relaxed and feminine options because that is contemporary. Let’s wait and see.)
And after that … well, who knows?
Brioni also will combine its precollections and main lines and will sell both after the shows, so there will be only two selling seasons a year as opposed to the current four. Brioni’s business is evenly split between its own stores and wholesale, with revenues of about 180 million euros, or $206 million, a year.
All of the changes will make for an interesting couture week, anyway. Brioni is not on the official calendar, but the jewelry brand Bulgari is — it will show on July 5 at the Italian Embassy in Paris — and Fendi has announced it will hold its second haute fourrure extravaganza in Rome on July 7.
Increasingly, when it comes to shows, anything goes.
