Photo credits: Credits: Astra Marina, Vanni Bassetti
Dear Shaded Viewers,
There are guest designer slots, and then there is what happened at Sant’Orsola on Wednesday night. A deconsecrated convent turned museum, ten o’clock, the witching hour for fashion — and Kei Ninomiya’s first-ever runway show for DSM walked into it. I am still thinking about it. This is exactly the kind of moment Pitti exists to deliver and so rarely does.
This was not another label playing dress-up in subculture signifiers for a season. Ninomiya was explicit that the punk community at the heart of this collection was never shorthand for tartan and bondage trousers — it went deeper than the costume. That is the difference between borrowing an aesthetic and actually understanding one, and it is everywhere in how this collection was built.
I love that this brand has spent two seasons being quiet on purpose. DSM Kei Ninomiya arrived as “real clothes, not image,” a deliberate departure from the otherworldly, technically extreme silhouettes Ninomiya is known for at Noir. The first two outings drew from the collegiate world and the soccer world — restrained, almost humble, choices for a designer with Ninomiya’s pedigree. So when Adrian Joffe tells you he pushed Ninomiya to stop being “nice” and finally show his real point of view for Pitti, you feel the stakes shift. This wasn’t a victory lap. It was a dare, accepted.
And from everything coming out of the preview, Ninomiya answered it with exactly the kind of discipline that makes his work so magnetic. Safety pins, the most clichéd punk signifier there is, showed up tone-on-tone, lined up with the precision of couture embellishment rather than the chaos of rebellion. That’s the whole Ninomiya sensibility in one detail: he takes the loudest gesture in the room and makes you listen for the craft underneath it. Leather jackets tooled with real precision, oversized shirts, trousers cutting a line between tailored and utilitarian with ankle zips and a curved leg, finished with sneakers and slip-ons from a Vans collaboration — this is a designer who insists, in his own words, that fabric, sewing, silhouette and pattern all carry equal weight to the concept, nothing sacrificed for the idea.
What makes me genuinely thrilled about this show, beyond the clothes, is the philosophy Ninomiya and Joffe attached to it. For Ninomiya, punk isn’t just an aesthetic — it’s a position that cares about minorities and ordinary people over money, openness over exclusivity. Joffe called it an attitude of refusing established norms, because rules don’t make progress, they just stop people from being themselves. And in a season where Joffe says the entire industry is gripped by caution and conservatism, here is a label doing the opposite — staging a runway debut for a three-season-old brand in a city where it has no stores, inside a former convent, at night, betting everything on feeling over safety.
“We need more punk,” Joffe said. After Wednesday night in Florence, I could not agree more.
