After a toast to a new season, a coming new year, and—hurrahs all around—a new Italian government, Pitti Immagine CEO Raffaello Napoleone briefed the crowd gathered for lunch in New York this afternoon on what to expect for the next editions of Pitti Uomo and Pitti W, the menswear and womenswear trade fairs in Florence [...]

Announced this morning: Gareth Pugh will be the next designer to show his collection at Pitti W, the womenswear portion of Pitti Immagine in Florence this January. (He follows Haider Ackermann, who showed women’s and his first men’s collection last January, and Proenza Schouler, Giles Deacon, and Giambattista Valli before him.) In selecting Pugh, Lapo [...]

Her influence on American fashion—via one customer in Washington in particular—is already outsized, and now it looks like her store may be, too. Chicago retailer Ikram Goldman is said to be shopping for a new, larger space in the Windy City. Will there be a private salon for you-know-who? [WWD]
There’s been no shortage of Maison [...]

At Midtown’s swank A Voce this afternoon, Raffaello Napoleone, CEO of Pitti Immagine—which oversees Florence’s menswear, womenswear, childrenswear, and textiles shows—was on hand to preach the Pitti gospel to a collection of editors over tagliata and crostata. The biggest names are, at this point, well known: Raf Simons will show his latest menswear collection for [...]

Pitti Immagine CEO Raffaello Napoleone held a lunch today at Adour, the Alain Ducasse restaurant in the St. Regis, to promote his organization’s January trade fair in Florence. One of the schedule’s highlights will be Giles Deacon’s Pitti W pre-fall presentation to be held at Richard Ginori 1735, a Florentine porcelain manufacturer. On the menswear [...]

Talk about a tough room. When Giambattista Valli presented his pre-fall 2009 collection at Pitti Immagine in Florence last night, his clothes competed for attention with Michelangelo. Seriously. The Valli catwalk ran through the Palazzo Vecchio’s storied Salone dei Cinquecento, where Michelangelo’s sculpture The Genius of Victory is housed and where Giorgio Vasari’s frescoes trumpet [...]

Is Michelle Obama the fashion industry’s one-woman stimulus package? Designers up and down Seventh Avenue (and the rest of us) are kinda, sorta hoping so.
In other pre-inaugural news: Feeling conflicted about how compulsively attached you are to your beloved mobile device of choice? Take solace. Barack Obama can’t live without his, either. Although, we [...]