The next edition of the White Homme, Milan’s White Show event dedicated to menswear, promises to be particularly rich. Starting on the 21st June, the event will present many new and exciting brands and designers, while focusing the attention on a few special performances, presentations and collaborations.

Finnish duo Laitinen will present through an intimate event a sophisticated collection entirely dedicated to men; Marithé + François Girbaud will be back to showcase their new menswear collection; Italian company Collection Privée will launch a project with seminal brand K-Way, based on reinventing the iconic jacket for all outdoor purposes; the students of Milan’s Nuova Accademia delle Belle Arti (NABA) will decorate over the three days of the fashion event the walls of the space dedicated to Italian designer Maurizio Miri and Italian architect and designer Vincenzo De Cotiis will open a special installation that analyses the shapes and silhouettes of the sleeves in men’s jackets, tracing in this way a link between the world of fashion and architecture. 

Massimiliano “Max” Bizzi, founder of Milan’s alternative showroom White, defines this edition of White Homme as “a democratic event”, organised by putting together lots of different presentations and performances, all of them inspiring and intriguing, rather than just one main catwalk show.

Dazed Digital: What inspired this edition of the White Homme?
Max Bizzi: Like all the previous editions, also this one was inspired by the passion for our job, but also by one great principle, attention to quality. We do believe indeed that brands are secondary and that high quality is what makes the difference. The quality of fashion has been really bad in the last few years: up until now you only needed to have a brand – even some footballers launched one – to create fashion, but the quality of the products was often really bad and, in some cases, we had reached the bottom. The current financial crisis and recession changed all this. The crisis opened our eyes and revealed us that global consumers don’t want to be taken around anymore, they are not excited about fashion and refuse to buy anything, even when the prices are extremely low. Consumers don’t want to buy because of the poor quality of many items. This is why high quality will be one of the main prerogatives at the White Homme.

Dazed Digital: Do you think the menswear sector has suffered from the crisis?    
Max Bizzi: They say menswear is in crisis, but I don’t think it is. I do have great faith in menswear, especially in those designer who constantly update it and make it look more modern and cutting edge. These are the sort of fresh and talented designers, brand and companies the White Homme likes to work with. I do feel that the White Homme has a great potential because Milan has a huge potential when it comes to menswear, being a place where lots of important and international buyers, coming from all over Europe, but also from America and Japan, meet.  

Dazed Digital: Can the White Homme be considered as an “antidote” to the crisis?
Max Bizzi: I think the best way to solve the crisis is by touching people’s hearts and exciting them with beautiful designs. I don’t even think that nowadays the main problem is the price of some items, I think the real problem is that fashion has lost the power to transmit emotions to people, so we must make sure we can restore this special power it used to have. Indeed, if what we see doesn’t intrigue or excite us, we don’t feel the need to buy it. We picked Finnish duo Laitinen because we were fascinated by their products and messages, in the same way we were fascinated by Maurizio Miri who’s maybe a more commercial designer and offers a style that suits a different kind of man, but Laitinen and Miri believe in what they are doing, love their jobs and inject their passion into their collections.

Dazed Digital: White Homme will also mark the launch of a radio, what will it broadcast?  
Max Bizzi: Redio – spelt with an ‘e’ – White is an Internet radio that will be broadcasting music that we all love at the White and that will hopefully make people happy. We see the radio as another way to reach out to more people. We will also organise a party that will be open to the public as we conceive the White as a democratic place and we think that fashion must be enjoyed by everybody.  

White Homme is at Superstudio Più, via Tortona 27, Milan, Italy, from 21st to 23rd June.