Twice a year Florence stops being a museum and becomes a marketplace again — the way it was when the Medici ran the wool trade. The occasion is Pitti Immagine, and for one night the city dressed up to celebrate it.
A night given over to fashion
On 14 June the city hosted a special evening entirely devoted to fashion. The RCS Group, in collaboration with the Comune di Firenze and Pitti Immagine, laid on a programme to animate the centre: shops illuminated until midnight, a charge of energy through the streets, and a sense of the whole city leaning into the trade fair that fills its hotels. But the night was billed as more than commerce — fashion, yes, but also culture and spectacle.
Palazzo Vecchio, and light over the piazza
Through the Comune's cultural office, Palazzo Vecchio was opened to free visits — the seat of Florentine civic power thrown open on a fashion night, which is its own quiet statement about where the city locates its identity. Meanwhile Piazza della Repubblica, programmed by the RCS titles, came alive after dark with a show of sound, light and colour: a suggestive performance of aerial dance, an installation of video architecture projected onto the square, and a live concert by the Italian singer Noemi. For an evening, the most monumental city in Italy let itself be lit up and danced over.
In praise of the buyers
What lingered, though, was less the spectacle than the crowd it gathered — the boutique owners and buyers queuing, beautifully dressed, to see the new menswear collections and to meet others like them from across the world. It is easy to romanticise designers and forget the people who actually move fashion: the buyers who purchase and risk, who educate the client, who carry and spread the work across continents. They are a kind of modern Marco Polo, and a city built on exactly that — merchants taking beautiful things to distant markets — is the right place to honour them.
Reading it again in 2026
Trade fairs have since had to fight the internet for relevance, and many have lost. What this Florentine night understood — that fashion is most alive as a physical, civic, social event, staged in a real place among real people — has only grown more poignant as so much of the industry migrated to the screen. It sits, in our archive, beside our other dispatches on the considered side of style, from Tvscia on the Paris catwalks to the art of the accessory. For one June night, Florence remembered it was a fashion city, and dressed accordingly.