A well-cut suit and long overcoat are always a good idea in Florence during Pitti Uomo's winter edition. Cover picture and photograph above by Andrea Heinsohn for DAM
Italy's foremost Renaissance city moves to its own sartorial rhythm, and during this season's Pitti Uomo it was that rhythm ~ subtle, assured, and quietly expressive ~ that set the tone. Away from spectacle and slogans, the city’s streets revealed a refined approach to menswear that upended mercurial fashion trends. What emerged was a collective mood: thoughtful dressing, ensconced in craft and ease, unfolding naturally against the austere architecture and elegant pace of the city itself, all captured by our Europe Editor and photographer Andrea Heinsohn
Hats of all styles, shapes and hues
were a feature at Pitti Uomo 109
FLORENCE has always understood the theatre of dress, but during Pitti Uomo's 109th edition, for Autumn/Winter 2026-27, the city’s streets became the
most compelling runway of all.
From the cobblestones outside Fortezza da Basso which hosts the more than 750 fashion designers and labels at the biannual tradeshow, to the shaded cafés lining the Arno, menswear unfolded not as trend
forecasting, but as lived style: personal, assured, and considered. Gelid mornings brought out an array of hats from leopard-print fedoras to peaked caps, purple berets and curling cowboy stetsons.
This season’s street style was marked by a confident
quietness. The peacocking of past years has softened into something more
nuanced: elegance over excess, intention over noise. Tailoring remained
central, but worn with a looseness that suggested ease rather than effort.
Double-breasted jackets were cut longer and lighter, often unlined, paired with
softly pleated trousers that moved with the body. Shoulders were relaxed,
proportions generous, and everything felt designed for real movement under the winter Tuscan sun.
Colour told its own story. Neutrals dominated ~ stone,
tobacco, olive, charcoal ~ but were punctuated with moments of confident
expression. A saffron knit under a linen blazer. A deep oxblood loafer
grounding an otherwise pale ensemble. Pastels appeared sparingly, most often
washed and chalky, giving pinks and blues a weathered, almost architectural
quality. Nothing felt accidental yet nothing shouted.
Pitti Uomo street style is not about chasing novelty; it is about refining identity and in Florence, panache doesn’t shout, it converses
A euphony of different textures and greys
made a subtle & elegant statement of style
Texture, however, did the talking. Crisp poplin shirts
rubbed shoulders with silks, raw linens, brushed cottons and soft symphonies in grey. There was a renewed appreciation for fabric as substance: materials
that crease, patinate and age. Many looks appeared already lived in, as if
style here was less about the moment and more about continuity.
Accessories were deliberate and restrained. Scarves, silk,
cotton, and the occasional archival print, were knotted with nonchalance.
Sunglasses were classic with a linear Seventies vibe rather than futuristic. Bags were practical: worn
leather totes, canvas cross-bodies, document cases that hinted at work rather
than display. Footwear ranged from impeccably polished derbies to softly beaten
suede loafers, often worn without socks in true Florentine defiance of
formality.
Perhaps most striking was the diversity of voices. Editors,
designers, artisans, fashionistas and buyers each brought their own vocabulary to the
streets, yet a shared respect for craft and individuality bound them together.
Pitti Uomo 2026’s street style was not about chasing novelty; it was about
refining identity. In Florence, style doesn’t shout, it converses. And this season the conversation has been richer, quieter, and more engaging than ever. ~ Jeanne-Marie Cilento
Scroll down to see more highlights from this season's Pitti Uomo street style in Florence, Italy
When art historian Linda Nochlin famously asked “why have there been no great women artists?” in 1971, her point wasn’t that women lacked talent. It was that the art world had systematically excluded and erased them from history.
In the 50 years since, scholars and curators have worked to reclaim these forgotten women artists. But change has been slow.
The Guerrilla Girls’ activism in the 1980s, the Countess Report’s damning statistics on gender inequality in Australian galleries, and the National Gallery of Australia’s recent Know My Name initiative show the fight for recognition is ongoing.
Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940 marks an exciting new chapter in this project. The new exhibition, from the Art Gallery of South Australia and the Art Gallery of New South Wales, makes a groundbreaking contribution to recovering the stories of overlooked women artists.
The global stage
With 222 works from 34 collections, Dangerously Modern celebrates the boldness and resilience of the first wave of professional Australian women artists who left for Europe between the turn of the 20th century and the second world war.
They went seeking advanced artistic training and the chance to compete on the global stage. Their time abroad was transformative.
Intimate portraits and domestic interiors by Florence Fuller (1867–1946) and Bessie Davidson (1879–1965) capture moments of quiet reflection. These artists navigated unfamiliar cultures, engaged with cutting-edge artistic movements and built new creative networks.
They lived far from home and maintained connections across two continents – often celebrated in one and forgotten in the other.
The exhibition sheds light on these expatriate artists. They engaged in artistic communities from bustling cosmopolitan centres like Paris and London to regional France, England, Ireland and North Africa.
It reveals the variety of artistic styles in which they worked while weaving together five themes that explore human experience and artistic purpose.
Truly modern
Bold and vibrant paintings by artists like Iso Rae (1860–1940) show their engagement with modern artistic movements.
Through painting en plein air (outdoors) and post-impressionist techniques (using vivid colours and expressive brushstrokes), these women expressed their own experience of modern life. For some, this included portraying their female lovers.
Art can help heal personal trauma. Here, in particular, these women looked at the devastation of war.
The pairing of paintings by Hilda Rix Nicholas (1884–1961) is especially powerful: The Pink Scarf (1913) glows with light, texture and delicate beauty; These Gave the World Away (1917) depicts her husband’s lifeless body on the battlefield.
By retracing the achievements and journeys of 50 expatriate women artists, the exhibition presents works never seen before in Australia. From the celebrated New Zealand artist Edith Collier (1885–1964), Girl in the Sunshine (c.1915) is notable for its bold use of colour, flattened perspective and simplified forms.
It also features works that haven’t been seen in Australia for over a century. A winter morning on the coast of France (1888) by Eleanor Ritchie Harrison (1854–95) was recently rediscovered and donated to the Art Gallery of New South Wales.
The exhibition also reunites works by artist friends who painted side by side.
We are privy to moments of breakthrough in these artists’ creativity and careers.
The exhibition brings together landscapes Grace Crowley (1890–1979), Anne Dangar (1885–1951) and Dorrit Black (1891–1951) painted together in 1928 while studying under the French artist André Lhote (1885–1962) in the hilltop village of Mirmande in southeastern France.
These works, to which the artists applied cubist principles (breaking down forms into geometric shapes and showing multiple perspectives), testify to both artistic freedom and each woman’s individual vision and skill.
Dorrit Black, Mirmande, 1928, oil on canvas, 60.0 x 73.8 cm.Elder Bequest Fund 1940, Art Gallery of South Australia, Adelaide
Though such works placed them at the forefront of French modern art movements, these artists were largely overlooked back in Australia.
Why? At the time, Australia’s conservative art establishment promoted a nationalist agenda. They favoured masculine depictions of labour and Australian landscapes painted by male artists working in Australia.
This elite group marginalised not only women artists but also expatriates who participated in international artistic developments. The resulting nationalist narrative long overlooked the themes this exhibition explores.
Nora Heysen (1911–2003), daughter of celebrated landscape painter Hans Heysen, exemplifies this dual marginalisation. Despite becoming the first woman and youngest artist to win the Archibald Prize in 1938, her self-portraits – which reveal her search for identity and assertion during her London years – remained hidden from public view until the 1990s.
When Thea Proctor (1879–1966) returned to Sydney from London in the 1920s, she wrote, as the catalogue quotes, “it seemed very funny to me to be regarded by some people here as dangerously modern”.
“Dangerously modern” perfectly captures the spirit of the exhibition. These expatriate women artists were seen as threats to tradition, gender roles and to the prevailing definition of what Australian art should be.
Agnes Goodsir, Girl with cigarette, c1925, oil on canvas, 99.5 x 81 cm.Bendigo Art Gallery, bequest of Amy E Bayne 1945, photo: Ian Hill
Beyond reclaiming the place of these women in the history of Australian art, the exhibition emphasises the importance of migration in shaping artistic identity.
By recognising works created abroad as integral to Australia’s artistic story, this exhibition transforms how we understand both Australian art and modernism as a global movement.
Dangerously Modern: Australian Women Artists in Europe 1890–1940 is at the Art Gallery of New South Wales until February 15 2026.
Victoria Souliman, Lecturer, French and Francophone Studies, University of Sydney
Against a backdrop of geometric skyscrapers, Tamara de Lempicka's Portrait of Romana de la Salle, 1928. The painting sold at Sotheby's New York in 2022 for $14.1 million and was previously owned by German fashion designer Wolfgang Joop for more than 20 years.
By Lynn Hilditch
In Paris in 1925, the French government initiated its ambitious International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts with one specific goal – to showcase and celebrate the excellence of French modern design. This display of innovative ideas contributed to the rise of a ubiquitous design style that became known as art deco.
In Toulouse, France, the Art Deco facade of the
Depeche du Midi newspaper, built in 1926 by
architect Leon Jaussely in rue Alsace Lorraine.
Originally conceived in western Europe in the 1910s, art deco became dominant in the 1920s and flourished between the first and second world wars. In the US it was known as art moderne (or streamline moderne), a symbol of American interwar prosperity, optimism and luxury – the epitome of the “roaring twenties”.
Although known by various names, the term art deco (short for the French arts décoratifs) has been attributed to the Swiss-French architectural designer Le Corbusier. He harshly criticised the new style in his journal L’Esprit Nouveau,pithily claiming that “modern decoration has no decoration”. Likewise, historian Nikolaus Pevsner considered its “jazzy modernism” a perversion of true modernism.
The term was only confirmed in 1968 with the publication of Bevis Hillier’s book Art Deco of the 20s and 30s, which fortified the style’s name. Hillier described art deco as “the last of the total styles” affecting “everything, from skyscrapers and luxury liners to powder compacts, thermos flasks, lampposts and letterboxes”.
In America, art deco spanned the boom of 1920s and the bust of the Depression-ridden 1930s. F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novels The Beautiful and the Damned (1922) and The Great Gatsby (1925) reflected the style of the period: flappers and “sheiks” embracing the spirit of frivolity, liberation and hopefulness.
The “machine age” was in full swing, and technology was rapidly improving quality of life. The period saw the introduction of the industrialised printing press, radio, the first skyscrapers and modern transportation. There was a sense of excitement and expectancy in the air, a time of anticipating a future filled with promise and possibility.
A sense of style
Radio City Music Hall's lobby in New York
opened in 1932. Brian Logan/Shutterstock
Stylistically, art deco’s distinct machine aesthetic replaced the flowing, floral motifs of the earlier arts and crafts and art nouveau styles. This movement incorporated streamlined, geometric designs that expressed the speed, power and scale of modern technology.
Design influences came from the early 20th century art movements of cubism, futurism and constructivism as well as from the ancient exotic cultures of Egypt, Assyria and Persia.
Zig-zags, sunbursts and stylistic flowers became synonymous with the style, along with the use of bright colours (influenced by fauvism), strong rectilinear shapes and new materials such as aluminium, stainless steel, chrome and plastic. According to art deco expert Alastair Duncan: “for the first time, the straight line became a source of beauty.”
Art deco often conjures up images of delicate Lalique glassware or the vibrant abstract designs of British ceramicist Clarice Cliff. But despite its European origin, art deco is perhaps best defined by American architecture.
The soaring Art Deco "Wisdom" design above the
main entrance to the Rockefeller Centre in New York
from the plaza, with its strong verticality in limestone.
The Chrysler Building, the Empire State Building and the Radio City Music Hall are among the most impressive examples with their sleek, linear appearance with stylised, often geometric ornamentation that transformed New York City into a futuristic modern metropolis. It is perhaps inevitable that art deco would influence film-making (Fritz Lang’s Metropolis, from 1927, for example) and later 20th-century design styles, like retrofuturism.
While painting is not closely associated with art deco, Tamara de Lempicka’s highly stylised portraits of aristocrats and socialites echoed the 1920s glamour and sophistication. Her work defined the role of “the new woman”, a term originally coined in the late-19th century, but also referring to a generation of free-spirited women with liberal interpretations of gender in the early 20th century.
Many of Lempicka’s paintings were of nudes with several set against a background of New York skyscrapers. The cubist influence in her work is also evident through her use of bold lines and geometric, angular shapes.
Lempicka’s work increased in popularity during the late-1980s when a string of celebrities, including Jack Nicholson and Barbra Streisand, expressed their admiration for her work.
A signature example of Art Deco style,
Tamara de Lempicka's "Young Girl in
Green" (1927) at the Centre Pompidou.
Madonna, an avid collector of the artist who has admitted to owning enough Lempicka paintings to open a museum, referenced Lempicka’s unique aesthetic in her music videos for Open Your Heart (1987), Express Yourself (1989), Vogue (1990) and included projections of Lempicka’s paintings in her 2023-24 Celebration Tour.
Today, the art deco style remains relevant and desirable. In January 2025, Country and Town House magazine announced “art deco is back for 2025” in interior design.
Mercedes-Benz recently showcased its new Vision Iconic show car – its dramatic radiator grille designed to harken back to the “golden era of automotive design in the 1930s”. Jaguar also created a pink show car earlier this year, the advert for which referenced the art deco architecture of Miami Beach.
A century after its Parisian debut, the art deco movement continues to inspire with its modernity, elegance and freedom of form, creating a sense of nostalgia through juxtaposing perspectives from the past and present..
Lynn Hilditch, Lecturer in Fine Art and Design Praxis,. Liverpool Hope University
Mr Darcy played by Colin Firth in the BBC's beloved 1995 adaptation of Jane Austen's novel Pride and Prejudice.
By Louise Curran
In Ang Lee’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility (1995), the handsome cad Willoughby (played by Greg Wise) rescues Marianne (Kate Winslet) on horseback in the middle of a raging storm. Pathetic fallacy has rarely looked so good.
Marianne locks eyes with him and falls passionately in love. In Austen’s version, though, it is Marianne’s mother and sister who first register his attractions. “The eyes of both were fixed on him with an evident wonder and a secret admiration … his person, which was uncommonly handsome, received additional charms from his voice and expression.”
Willoughby has “exterior attractions” that the two women quickly notice. Once Marianne can master her own confusion, she rapidly constructs him in her mind as the ideal romantic protagonist.
“His person and air were equal to what her fancy had ever drawn for the hero of a favourite story … Her imagination was busy, her reflections were pleasant, and the pain of a sprained ankle was disregarded.”
Yet despite such auspicious beginnings, by the end of the novel Willoughby has proved to be feckless, shallow and passively cruel. The actual leading man turns out to be the respectable, yet taciturn, Colonel Brandon (played in the film by Alan Rickman).
In his introduction to the 1895 edition of Sense and Sensibility, the poet and essayist Henry Austin Dobson remarked upon the shrewd realism at work in Austen’s ending: “Every one does not get a Bingley, or a Darcy (with a park); but a good many sensible girls like Elinor pair off contentedly with poor creatures like Edward Ferrars, while not a few enthusiasts like Marianne decline at last upon middle-aged colonels with flannel waistcoats.”
For many modern readers, Brandon remains a disappointing compromise when compared with Willoughby’s flagrant virility.
Austen’s heartthrobs
All of Austen’s leading men are rich, which certainly helps to intensify their charms. Fitzwilliam Darcy of Pride and Prejudice is the wealthiest man of Austen’s fiction.
Initially he draws local attention for his “fine, tall person, handsome features, noble mien, and the report, which was in general circulation within five minutes after his entrance, of his having ten thousand a year”, until he is quickly “discovered to be proud”.
One of the key debates of Pride and Prejudice (1813) concerns marriage for love versus convenience and financial security. Elizabeth Bennet’s intelligent aunt Mrs Gardiner argues that the phrase “violently in love” is “so hackneyed, so doubtful, so indefinite” and “often applied to feelings which arise only from a half hour’s acquaintance”.
She eloquently expresses the problematic nature of infatuation and the fictional construction of the heroic ideal so prevalent in Regency culture.
Colin Firth’s infamous Pride and Prejudice wet shirt scene.
The phrase recurs right at the end of the novel, at the moment Elizabeth discloses her feelings for Darcy, producing a happiness in him that he “had probably never felt before; and he expressed himself on the occasion as sensibly and as warmly as a man violently in love can be supposed to do”.
The repeated phrase is a lovely touch, hesitating as it does between endorsing Darcy as a swoon-worthy leading man, burning with passion, and holding back from such excesses through the suggestion of a faint ridiculousness.
The 1995 BBC adaptation of Pride and Prejudice gave visual language to this conjunction of intrepid yet hesitant masculinity. Darcy (played memorably by Colin Firth) emerged from water like an Adonis in a wet shirt, only to face an embarrassed encounter with Elizabeth (Jennifer Ehle). Though usually handsome and always relatively rich, Austen’s leading men are also unconventional in that they can be awkward, mistaken, tongue-tied – even a bit dull.
When Darcy’s housekeeper at Pemberley describes him as “handsome”, this adjective, as Austen expert Janet Todd has noted, “extends over physical, social and moral qualities”. This conjunction of qualities shapes the leading men of Austen’s fiction not so much as suitors as familiar figures who come to be transformed by love.
Uncomfortable matches
Some aspects of this heroism might strike modern readers as odd, and they alert us to changing perceptions of the romantic hero since Austen’s time.
The age difference in Emma between Emma Woodhouse (21) and George Knightley (37) was not uncommon in the Regency era, when marriage was often predicated on women’s reproductive value and men’s financial security.
It can be uncomfortable for some readers when Knightley emphasises the fact that he was 16 years old when Emma was born (as he is cradling his baby niece). And when he jokes about having been in love with her since she was “13 at least”. Rather than suggesting anything dubious, this was intended to draw attention to the incremental steps the couple make from brother and sister-in-law to friends and then lovers.
Johnny Flynn’s Knightley has more youthful energy.
Recent adaptations of Emma seem uncomfortable with this age gap. Despite the fact that both Jeremy Northam and Johnny Flynn were in their mid-30s, and of similar age to Knightley in their respective versions (1996 and 2020), Flynn gives off a younger, more virile energy. He punches the air in joy when he realises Emma will marry him, in contrast to Northam’s emotional restraint.
Maria Edgeworth, a contemporary novelist and important influence on Austen, was struck by the way Austen’s leading men were supportive in private as much as in public.
In a letter, Edgeworth referenced the moment in Persuasion (1817) where Captain Wentworth shows his feelings for Anne by submitting to domestic chores: “The love and lover [are] admirably well drawn: don’t you see Captain Wentworth, or rather don’t you in her place feel him taking the boisterous child off her back as she kneels by the sick boy on the sofa?”
In figures such as Emma’s Mr Knightley, who represents the landed English class, and Persuasion’s Frederick Wentworth, a naval hero of the Napoleonic wars, Austen put emphasis on a new kind of domestic masculinity as a source of female desire and national pride.
Like Austen’s heroines, her leading men are not superlatively good. Their enduring appeal lies more in their capacity for self development and their acceptance of change and adaptation. Austen depicts love as the awakening of mutual esteem. It’s something to be worked on rather than something that magically arrives.
Louise Curran, Lecturer in Eighteenth-Century and Romantic Literature, University of Birmingham
