The Pitti trade shows have restarted for Italian fashion

“We have made about ten thousand people work in total safety this week - says Raffaello Napoleone, CEO of Pitti Immagine - and this is the first great result that I want to highlight. The Pitti trade shows were the first among the major international fashion events to reopen. We have been a forerunner and a model. Stazione Leopolda for Pitti Filati, then Fortezza da Basso for Pitti Uomo and Pitti Bimbo, were the physical spaces and at the same time the symbolic places of a restart of fashion. Generally I do not indulge in sentimentality, but if there was a special figure for the days of the fair that end today, it is the combination of desire, need, pleasure to return to confront each other in person, to exchange ideas and comments, even to share the difficulties experienced in the recent past and which are still with us, together with the reaffirmation of an intact love for work through the presentation of the new collections. The data on buyers' participation should be read in this context, where quality, motivation and concentration were the elements most emphasized by the exhibitors themselves”.

While Pitti Filati - from 28 to 30 June - recorded the presence of over 1,700 buyers and professionals (France, Germany and USA among the greatest performances), Pitti Uomo and Pitti Bimbo in the Fortezza (from 30 June to 2 July), a few hours after closing, have already exceeded 6,000 visitors (of which more than 4,000 are buyers), with an overall foreign buyer percentage of just under 30%.

With some surprises. In addition to European countries (Germany, France, Switzerland, Spain, Austria, Holland, Belgium, Russia, Poland, Greece and Portugal in the lead), buyers arrived from the United States (driven by large department stores such as Bergdorf Goodman and Neiman Marcus), from Canada and Turkey, and also the European representatives of the main department stores and retail groups in China, Hong Kong, Japan and Korea, countries from which it is not yet possible to travel. A limited but extraordinarily significant attendance. The presence of media was also significant: over 700 journalists attended the fairs, of which about 300 from abroad.

Nicoletta Curradi