Pitti Uomo do not do things by half. When you have the honour of being a guest designer, expect to have the entire city of Florence as your playground. We saw this three seasons ago when S.S. Daley decamped to Florence and had his runway show in the opulent Palazzo Vecchio. Last season, MM6 Maison Margiela took over a huge glass and steel greenhouse in the city’s botanical gardens. Now, for Homme Plissé Issey Miyake’s turn as guest of honour, the world’s fashion press were bussed about 45 minutes out of Florence, deep into the Tuscan countryside to a villa once owned by the legendary Medici family.

Upon arrival, guests were greeted by an exhibition in the villa’s central atrium, dedicated to both the brand’s history of pleating and the extensive research and development behind the collection they were about to see. Colour swatches were arranged on a pleated oval plinth that encircled the room, showing the process of finding an exact colour match to a Tuscan lemon, for example, or the particular blue of a particular boat. These were the colours of the Italian countryside, and the Homme Plissé team gathered hundreds of them. This all translated into a central theme around paint and paintbrushes, with the collection being titled, Amid Impasto of Horizons.

As reported in March, Homme Plissé is stepping away from its traditional home on the Paris menswear schedule and embarking on a global journey. The brand is moving beyond seasonal collections, instead focusing on specific locations that will directly inspire each new offering in an initiative called Open Studio. Hence, the levels of research that went into this Pitti collection, literally gathering colours and fabrics from the area directly surrounding Florence and reimagining it all through a distinctly Homme Plissé lens.

The result was a collection that was both a vibrant cacophony of colour and deeply practical in design. The opening look came from a micro-line titled Painter’s Gear, directly inspired by the Homme Plissé team’s excursions into the far reaches of Tuscany, paints and brushes in hand, as they sought to match the colours of the landscape. These pieces were, naturally, accessorised with tubes of oil paint and wide-brimmed brushes.

Elsewhere, Homme Plissé looked to Italian tailoring and styling. Famously, the tailoring of a Japanese jacket, for example, is quite visibly different from how they’ve traditionally been cut in Italy. In this collection, the jackets were cut double-breasted and featured wide lapels. It was a distinctly tailored look for a number of pieces, which blended the worlds of Italy and Japan in a genuinely exciting way. As always with Homme Plissé, there was room for playfulness. And the fun this season came in the form of the Carrier Carried pieces. These were, essentially, large coats that could be folded into becoming their own garment bags. Some were even accessorised with a single hanger, hooked on like a keychain.