Stefano Pilati Lands at Pitti With Random Identities: “I Don’t Have to Prove Anything”

Random Identities makes its Pitti debutPhoto: Courtesy of Random Identities

It’s been very nearly four years since Stefano Pilati took his last bow for his Ermenegildo Zegna Couture fall 2016 collection. Last night at Pitti Uomo we got an in-the-flesh look at Random Identities, the project he has been showcasing and retailing digitally since 2017 from his base in Berlin.

Pilati has for the most part kept his counsel in his post-Zegna period, but did, in the current of issue of L’Uomo Vogue, describe this label as “a contemporary style that follows today’s evolutions. It inspires young adults to be themselves in how they dress, instead of trying to identify with another person’s style. They aren’t obligated to fall in line with anything. They should dress how they feel, however they wish.”

As a manifesto for modern dressing, that statement promised much. What we saw last night in Florence delivered and then some. After a painful wait standing bunched around a red-lit runway in the Stazione Leopolda—one wag joked about this being the first time he’d done Pilati’s for a while (get it? Stefano Pilati/pilates)—the lights flipped to white. What came next was the most progressively exciting collection of the decade so far—even if we are less than a fortnight into it.

The crystal bra worn between the white shirt and black suit of the first model was an empty vessel that signified the gender-fluid direction to which Random Identities has been advertised as catering. But as the show unfolded, its looks evidently worn by self-identifiers of myriad hues within the increasingly boundless spectrum of gender and sexuality, what was most refreshing was that there was no bald polarity of masculine versus feminine within which they were categorized via that clothing.

Sure, pretty much everyone wore wide high heels (except, I think, the young beanied kid in an oversized patterned knit who was, someone said backstage, named Rocket), and there were men in skirts, and women in menswear shirting imprinted in black lace bras. There were, for sure, hints of kink and jolts of allure designed to erode and elude conventional subjectivities. Pilati’s mastery of the creation of devastatingly compelling silhouettes for either side of cis was honed in over a decade at Yves Saint Laurent, as well as that stint at Zegna and earlier manifestations in Miu Miu and Armani.