MFF: Silvia Bini
Editorial
Edition 99
07.04.2021
“Men’s fashion needs more elegance and quality”
According to the buyer, who manages five boutiques on the Tuscan coast, too much streetwear is standardizing the men’s wardrobe to the detriment of personality and style. 

“We are experiencing what is a dramatic moment for fashion. The pandemic is obstructing the entire industry, retailers included”. This is the beginning of our interview with Silvia Bini, reference for luxury shopping on the Tuscan coast, with five boutiques representing the most well-known designer labels, as well as a countless number of experimental brands. “Over the course of my professional life, I have had to overcome difficult moments, but no one ever imagined we would have to deal with a situation like this. Everything is so dramatic and has left us in a state of shock”.

What repercussions do you see for the fashion industry?
We are completely out of control. We open and close stores with terrible consequences for orders and collections. All this inevitably reflects also upon the productive segment of subcontractors and suppliers. Plus, men’s fashion has suffered much more over the last three seasons than women’s, even without considering the crisis set off by the pandemic, also in terms of quality. 

Could you better explain to us your idea of men’s fashion?
In recent years, men’s fashion in particular has increasingly moved towards streetwear: sweatshirts, jeans, sneakers, and t-shirts. This standardization has from one end made sales easier, but from the other end, has diminished the quality of collections. Online sales themselves lower quality. Today, fashion is extremely visual, with very little content, however. Fashion, and especially men’s, should recover the codes of the past: style, elegance, and common courtesy.

What might be the strategies for a new relaunching?
Personally, this past year, I once again began, in what was a bit of a countertrend, to update menswear in a “men’s” key, proposing a wider variety of attractive overcoats and jackets that are striking in both their lines and materials, while thinking back on everything I learned when I was a little girl by my father’s side: the gallantry of clothing, quality, elegance, and style. In my opinion, all this could be key to relaunching. I was raised on bread and gabardine. Are you aware of just how many young stylists today do not even know about the various kinds of fabrics? When I was little, clothing was made in accordance with the fabric being used. Today, designers create clothes, and then everything else is managed by other colleagues, in consideration of costs and profit. Plus, I’ve had enough of this overdose of creativity which, paradoxically, does not convey  any personality to the wardrobe.

Besides this moment, have there been other milestones in your professional life?
Certainly, when I decided to work for my family’s boutique. Inheriting my family’s business was not part of my life plan. I wanted to go to the United States and follow my passions, but then I found myself here, and once I started helping out, I decided to stay.