Soshi Otsuki named as Guest Designer for Pitti Uomo 109

Pitti Uomo has announced Soshi Otsuki as guest designer for its upcoming winter edition (January 13 to 16, 2025). The Japanese designer, winner of the LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers in 2025, will take centre stage in Florence with a special catwalk show dedicated to his eponymous brand, written ‘Soshiotsuki’.

“Meeting Soshi Otsuki in Tokyo and stepping into his world, we felt an immediate affinity and did not hesitate: we promptly offered him a premiere at the January edition of Pitti Uomo,” said  Francesca Tacconi, special events coordinator at Pitti Immagine.

“It has been fifteen years since I tried- on four occasions- to enter a fashion competition in Italy, which I ultimately never won. At the time, I thought Japan’s sombre atmospheres were ill-suited to a sky as bright as Italy’s, and I set the idea aside. Now, more than a decade later, it is a great honour for me to be able to show in Florence. I am intrigued and excited to see, today, the effect of Soshiotsuki’s clothes under the Italian sky,” said the designer.

Born in 1990, Soshi Otsuki launched his eponymous menswear label in 2015. His second collection was shortlisted for the 2016 LVMH Prize, while in 2019 he received the Tokyo New Designer Award.

Otsuki, who graduated in menswear from Bunka Fashion College, draws on Japan’s classical performing arts in his creative process, translating them into fashion through tailoring and craftsmanship executed with meticulous attention to detail.

“An ideal of ambitious clarity emerges from Soshi’s work, grounded in a constant dialogue with a millennia-old tradition, yet imbued with modern sartorial awareness,” said Francesca Tacconi. “It is Made in Japan filtered through the lens of Made in Italy: the reference is to the years of the ‘baburu keiki’ [the Japanese economic bubble in the mid-1980s], when men in Tokyo wore Armani- wore Italian. The language, however, is contemporary and decidedly anti-nostalgic, recoded according to the desires of the present, with a subtle yet effective commercial bent.”

Soshiotsuki also created the outfit for the new campaign tied to the theme of the upcoming edition of Pitti Uomo.