“The Pool” is not only the visual theme of the new edition of Pitti Immagine Uomo, but a metaphor for contemporary menswear: a man facing his own reflection, seduced by the image and at the same time forced to measure himself against the transformations of his time.
The pool should not be read merely as a place of summer, vacation, water, and relaxed elegance. In this edition of Pitti Uomo it becomes something more subtle: a shiny and ambiguous surface, capable of reflecting an image but also of distorting it.
One gesture is enough — a hand grazing the water, a small ripple — and what seemed stable begins to shift. This is where the theme “The Pool” becomes interesting: not in the beauty of the scenography, but in its restlessness.
The reflection is the image that fashion produces of us. It is the way we want to appear, the identity we choose to show, the presence we construct before others. Today a man does not merely wear a garment: he constructs a posture, a narrative, a public image.
For this reason, the contemporary Narcissus is not simply a vain man. He is a man aware of living in a society dominated by the gaze, by social media, by aesthetics, by the desire to be observed — but who perhaps is also beginning not to want to remain a prisoner only of appearance.
Menswear, then, looks at itself in the mirror and asks what it wants to become.
It is not only about understanding which jackets, colors, or trends will accompany the spring/summer 2027. The more interesting question is another: what kind of man is being born? More fragile, more fluid, more aware, less rigid in relation to the codes of the past?
In this reading there also enters a literary shadow: that of Dorian Gray. Not because menswear is “corrupted” like Oscar Wilde’s character, but because fashion has always lived in the ambiguous relationship between appearance and truth, between surface and depth, between public image and hidden transformation.
In the novel it is not the mirror that changes, but the portrait: Dorian remains young and perfect, while the hidden image registers time, choices, decay. Pitti’s pool can be read, then, as a liquid portrait: not an innocent mirror, but a surface that retains something.
The man looks at himself in the water, but the water does not return a clear and definitive image. The reflection is blurred, ambiguous, unstable. Just like contemporary masculine identity, which is no longer fixed, marble-like, compact.
Pitti Uomo 110 seems to start from here: not from the certainty of a new style, but from a deeper question.
What remains of the man when his image ceases to be still?
Today’s menswear is this reflection that can no longer remain still. And perhaps precisely for this reason it becomes interesting again.
— Alessandro Sicuro
Brand Strategist | Photographer | Art Director | Project Manager
Alessandro Sicuro Comunication
Sure-com America 