Y/Project named as guest brand for Pitti Uomo 95

By

Dominique Muret

Published
Oct 11, 2018

The guest of honour for next January's Pitti Uomo has been announced. For its 95th edition, which will take place in Florence from 8th to 11th January 2019, the leading menswear trade show has decided to spotlight Parisian fashion house Y/Project and its talented designer Glenn Martens. 

"It's definitely one of the most interesting realities of the current fashion landscape," Pitti Immagine's director of communication, special events and international relations, Lapo Cianchi, told FashionNetwork.com, having attended Y/Project's latest womenswear runway show in Paris on 27th September. The label is slated to show it's menswear collection in Florence on Tuesday, 9th January or Wednesday, 10th, and will therefore be skipping Paris Fashion Week this season. 

It seems like everything's coming up roses for Glenn Martens, who won the Andam Prize in 2017. Showing at Pitti Uomo, where he follows in the footsteps of Virgil Abloh and Raf Simons, is tantamount to a stamp of approval for the 35-year-old Flemish designer, who originally trained as an interior designer in Bruges, before passing through Antwerp's Royal Academy of Fine Arts, and who has made a name for himself on the fashion scene with his creative reinvention of both the men's and womenswear wardrobe. 

The designer, who has previously worked for Jean Paul Gaultier, took over Y/Project in 2013 after the death of its founder Yohan Serfaty, who launched the menswear brand in 2010 and with whom Martens was working as first assistant at the time. He has since expanded the label's offering, giving it a new drive. 

Architecture, construction, deconstruction, reversibility and versatility are all key themes which underlie the designer's work every season, allowing him to create comfortable, multi-use clothes which can be interpreted in a number of different ways, all while provoking searching questions about how we dress today. 

With its eclectic offering combining streetwear and nouvelle couture, Y/Project has been picked up by 150 multi-brand distributors around the world, including Dover Street Market, Barney's, Selfridges, Lane Crawford, Net-A-Porter, Mytheresa.com, Matchesfashion.com and Ssense. The brand, which reports revenues of 7 million euros, is backed by investor and CEO Gilles Elalouf, former head of Publicis' interactive strategy.