Hed Mayner’s Pitti Uomo show was all about finding beauty in ‘wrongness’

There’s something inherently wrong about a palace sitting beside a train station, its proximity to the rush of commuters at odds with the idea of royal remove. But then again, La Palazzina Reale is no typical palace. Built in the 1930s as a stopover for the royal family during visits to Florence, the squat structure designed by Gruppo Toscano hides its beauty behind a sober facade – inside, lavish walnut panelling, shimmering golden tiles and swathes of marble flooring reveal its royal patronage. Yet the building’s placement is its most intriguing feature – one side looks onto Florence’s ancient cobbled streets, the other sits so close to the platforms of Santa Maria Novella station that one could step straight from the back veranda onto a train.

Now home to the Architecture Society of Florence, La Palazzina Reale is situated just a few minutes away from the medieval fortress where Pitti Uomo, the biannual menswear fair, traditionally takes place. Rather than whisking guests off to one of Florence’s more fairytale frescoed settings, as Issey Miyake did last season, Hed Mayner chose this curious building – sandwiched between history and the everyday lives of modern Florentines – as the site of his headline guest designer show at the fair’s 109th edition last night.

Hed Mayner at Pitti Uomo A/W 2026

‘The reason I wanted to show here was because sometimes when you come to Florence, or big cities with history, you get this “look and don’t touch” feeling, like you’re in a museum,’ the warm-voiced, Israel-born designer explained on the morning of the show, standing in the airy presidential room wearing his signature twisted tailoring. ‘I wanted both an old-fashioned feeling and a new one – of everyday life on the other side.’

An invitation to the main guest slot at Pitti is a career highlight for any menswear designer (past spotlights have included Raf Simons, Grace Wales Bonner and Martine Rose). For Mayner, the opportunity also allowed him to spend extended time closer to his manufacturers. Typically Paris-based, the designer has been working from Italy for the past six months in the lead-up to the show. Mayner first rose to acclaim in the mid-2010s with a series of collections that cleverly played with the oversized proportions of traditional orthodox Jewish tailoring, winning the Karl Lagerfeld Prize at the LVMH Prize in 2019 and continually studying how tailoring can protect and transform the body ever since. Mayner’s last display in Paris revealed a vulnerability not previously seen in his work, with his hulking tailored silhouettes emptied of structure so that garments collapsed softly around the body. It was, he said at the time, a search for lightness in a heavy world.

Last night, as hundreds of guests settled into rows of mid-century seats inside La Palazzina Reale, it quickly became clear that a sense of force was back in the designer’s hands. Much like the unlikely palace itself, the collection that came was hooked on a pleasurable sense of wrongness. Mayner’s opening character set the tone, arriving in the dimly lit rooms in a houndstooth tailored coat cut with draped shoulders and no sleeves, worn over a pale gridded shirt and sparkling silver sequinned joggers. ‘It’s about creating a body language, a certain gesture,’ Mayner explained earlier in the day. ‘When you wear these clothes, they put you into a certain mood, an environment. There’s something wrong about these shapes, and that wrongness is perfect for me.’

‘So wrong it’s right’ became the guiding principle. Mayner’s cast of characters followed through the room as an orchestral soundtrack overlaid with the voice of Canadian-American artist Agnes Martin played overhead, reciting her 1989 line: ‘Beauty is the mystery of life. It is not in the eye, it is in the mind.’ Martin’s words on our individual experiences of beauty felt pointed, as each of Mayner’s looks skewed traditional wardrobe staples with something, a ‘gesture’ as he puts it, that was deliberately off – a jacket with broad, front-forward shoulders suctioned in at the waist; a cinematic faux fur coat detailed with a leather strap across the back; collars of shirting sliced off, sweatshirts twisted and scarves so long they skimmed the ground. Both familiar and strange, the oddness of these clothes served a specific purpose: Mayner said he wanted to make space for the wearer’s personality to emerge.

Mayner is a designer keenly aware of clothing’s ability to transform how you feel. He has long explored tailoring as a kind of armour, pushing the power suit to extremes through huge proportions and sculpting hunched silhouettes that charge the wearer with a villainous kind of command. While much of the new collection worked within his architectural signatures, there was a noticeable new energy too. A series of womenswear looks marked fresh territory, such as a deep blue crushed velvet gown that exposed the entire back, its overt sensuality offset by another look that cocooned the body in circular, soft-shouldered layers of plum-shaded mock suede. ‘I like it because it reminds me of furniture,’ the designer said of the divisive fabric with a wry smile earlier that morning.

Rather than a statement about expanding his brand’s remit to a wider audience, Meynar’s intention with these women’s looks was far purer. ‘This season, the starting point was the body,’ he explains. ‘It's not about making a women's collection, it's more about just kind of opening the lens to different body types to create a new silhouette inside the collection.’

Seen together, Mayner’s cast of characters seemed to belong to a hard-to-place world, where Soviet-era formality – lent by handkerchief scarves wrapped around heads and rounded furry hats – clashed with the unmistakable modernity of crumpled flannel and billowing denim jeans. By shuffling archetypes, eras and textures, the aim, he says, is to create a kind of ‘parallel reality’ in which the wearer is free to step into a more heightened, bolder version of themselves. ‘There is this kind of intimacy between you and what you wear,’ he says. ‘It’s about how you are in the world.’

As Mayner ran through the stately rooms of the Palazzina behind the models at the show’s close, a train shuddered into the platform at Santa Maria Novella station, the screech of brakes and the murmur of passengers alighting mixing with applause. By a stroke of fate, it was, like Mayner’s collection itself, a moment of fantasy and reality collapsing in real time – he couldn’t have timed better if he’d written the train schedule himself.

pittimmagine.com