Umit Benan Is Back

Five years after putting his namesake label on pause, Umit Benan is back.

Armed with a new business model and financing from New Guards Group co-founder Davide De Giglio, the master tailor is relaunching Umitbenan (one word this time around) and will unveil a new collection and retail concept on Friday in Milan.

Benan has evolved since the 2010s, when his buzzy, fashion-forward shows rocked Milan fashion week, and occasionally Pitti Uomo, with visions of retired rockstars, sports heroes and efendi gentlemen. After years of creative anarchy, he has left bold fashion propositions behind for a take on classicism.

But Benan’s cinematic eye remains intact. That he once wanted to be a filmmaker is evident in the way character building is baked into the new venture, which offers made-to-measure, bespoke and wardrobe curation alongside ready-to-wear, building on the small custom business B+ that he quietly launched in 2019 after putting his brand on ice. (Moncler mogul Remo Ruffini and gallerist Thaddaeus Ropac are among his top clients).

“As I grew up, my vision grew too, and I’ve finally reached what I consider my maturity, keeping the spirit but giving it a rounder expression. I see my role as designer to really become apparent through dialogue. I aim at helping my clients find the better outer version of themselves,” Benan says, a week before the presentation of his new collection and the opening of his first store.

The shop’s location, on Via Bigli, is savvy: right behind Via Montenapoleone, Milan’s luxury ground-zero, and yet sufficiently off the beaten track as to be intriguing. “It’s the same street where I lived when I first moved to Milano: it’s the circle closing,” the designer says. (De Giglio’s men’s grooming venture Eredi Zucca is next door).

Designed by Martin Brûlé, the interior is warm and masculine, all wood, brushed metal, mirror and sand. It’s not immediately recognizable from the street, with the sole window featuring not clothes but art selected by Ropac.

“The idea is to welcome clients into what looks like a private mansion or club,” explains Benan. “The ground floor features ready-to-wear, but the beating heart is downstairs, where the experience is taken to a more intimate, personalised level, and the full potential of Umitbenan as a project based on dialogue naturally manifests.”

If all of this makes you think of a cabal of wealthy eccentrics and renegade tycoons out of a Bret Easton Ellis novel, you’re not far off. Benan’s penchant for the 80s and 90s is real, and the gentlemen’s club vibe is intentional.

I meet Benan not at the store, however, but at the mansion in Milan’s Navigli district that houses his studio. I’m here for a preview of the collection, but I also get a glimpse of how the business and “retail parlor” will operate. As I arrive, the ebullient designer, who was born in Istanbul, schooled in Switzerland and moved to Italy to answer his fashion calling, is deep in conversation with a client. items are tried on, fabrics chosen, a follow-up scheduled.

“This man, a lawyer, came to me because he saw someone wearing my stuff: this is our first meeting which for me is essentially a mutual exploration,” Benan explains as we sit down. “I prefer to build things slowly.”

True to form, Benan’s partnership with De Giglio took time to come to fruition. “I have known and admired Umit for a long time and immediately saw great potential in him, but felt he was still in the process of channeling his creativity into a narrative that didn’t quite align with the idea I had in mind for building a brand,” De Giglio recalls. “It took a year of gentle courtship before we finally launched this new project.”

It’s a universe away from De Giglio’s last breakout fashion success, the streetwear sensation Off-White. But there’s a distinctly De Giglio-esque formulation to the concept: if Off-White offered what, in 2019, he called “luxury fast fashion,” Umitbenan is about “bespoke prêt-à-porter,” he says.

“The strategy is to have very few, highly selected [wholesale] partners, and to build retail in a different way,” De Giglio explains. “Each store will have two levels, two different areas. [Downstairs] friends of the brand can, for the first time, create bespoke prêt-à-porter, which is possible for us because we have access to our own industrial platform. It’s the meeting point between craftsmanship and structure.”

Thankfully, the quality of the garments is unquestionable. Benan is a stickler for doing things well. Whether that’s scalable remains to be seen. But it’s a factor that has long helped the designer punch above his weight.

“Umit has managed to become known to so many people in the showbiz side of our industry — and even in Hollywood — in such an organic way, through word of mouth,” says De Giglio. “It’s the values that make a brand grow, not a multi-million-dollar campaign plastered on the side of a skyscraper.”

“We’re still romantics,” he adds. “And anyway, we couldn’t afford that kind of campaign even if we wanted to.”