The Iconoclast

A tastemaker to tastemakers, Umit Benan just might be Milan’s most exciting, and exacting, designer—even as he seems increasingly disinterested in the notion of fashion’.

- Andrea Strafile

UMIT BENAN MADE his name young, hitting the menswear scene with his eponymous label in 2009 and winning Pitti Uomo’s distinguished Who Is On Next? award that same year with his second collection, all by age 30. In the years since his debut, the Milan-based designer has earned considerable acclaim, said goodbye to fashion shows and then returned to the runway— opening Milan in 2018 with a collection titled God Is Black—and introduced, in 2019, his Umit Benan B+ collection of luxe, sharply tailored unisex garments, from knitwear to suiting to double-breasted cashmere overcoats.

“In the new collections, which are increasingly unisex, I first build the model on the man, then transfer it to the woman and make adjustments until it is absolutely perfect for both,” he says of his method of working. For women, the clothes add a touch of the masculine while the opposite is true for men; in the end, these are perfectly curated pieces that work on every body.

Born in Germany to Turkish parents, Benan is a global citizen, having attended boarding school in Switzerland and university in Boston and then living for spells in New York City and London. It seems that part of him has never quite aligned with the posturing of the fashion world, wanting instead to embrace something less ephemeral, more rooted in human stories.