Inside the Fortezza da Basso, a sunlit room of garments that the weather wrote. JiyongKim, a Seoul label that lets the seasons finish its clothes, has been named a special guest of Pitti Uomo 110. The brand's installation runs the four days of the fair. The Spring 2027 presentation lands on June 17.
Jiyong Kim works with sun and time. The brand's signature technique, called Sun-Bleach, leaves fabrics outside for months. Sunlight, dew, rain and wind do the colour work. Each finished piece reads the weather it stood in, which means no two are alike, and the studio cannot reproduce a result it likes.
Pitti Immagine has invited the designer to show at the June fair in Florence, on the Fortezza grounds where the trade week sets up its central pavilions. The 110th edition runs Tuesday June 16 through Friday June 19. JiyongKim takes a dedicated room in the Magazzino 07 spaces inside the fortress for the four days, with a presentation on Wednesday.
The room
The format is an exhibition rather than a runway. The studio has been clear it wants the visitor to read clothes, space and the passage of time as the same thing. Garments treated for months will hang next to the equipment and surfaces that exposed them. Sun maps and weather notes belong to the production line at this label, and they belong on the wall.
Pitti Uomo opened the special-guest slot to four designers this June rather than the usual three. Simone Rocha takes the Teatro della Pergola on the 18th. Sunflower from Copenhagen takes the Teatro del Maggio Musicale on the 17th. Kei Ninomiya, on his Dover Street Market label, takes a late-night slot. JiyongKim sits inside the Fortezza for the whole run.
How he got here
The designer studied at Bunka Fashion College in Tokyo and then at Central Saint Martins in London. He worked in the studios at Lemaire in Paris and at Louis Vuitton before opening his own brand in Seoul. The LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers named him a semifinalist in 2024, which placed his Sun-Bleach pieces in front of the LVMH design directors and the Prize jury in Paris.
The brand opened a flagship in Seoul in 2024, a quiet shop that doubles as a studio annex. The Korea Creative Content Agency, the cultural arm of the South Korean government that backs creative export, helped to broker the Pitti invitation. The Florence guest slot is the first stage on a circuit that the Korean side has been building around Seoul Fashion Week and its menswear talent.
Jiyong Kim, founder of JiyongKim · Courtesy of LVMH Prize
The clothes
The signature pieces are tailored, neutral, and patient. Cotton, linen and silk go onto exposure racks for several months. The longer the wait, the deeper the fade, with edges and folds catching the sun while the shielded sections stay close to the original colour. The result is a single garment with two or three tones running through it that the cutter then has to plan around.
Pattern cutting carries the rest. The brand favours lean menswear shapes, clean shoulder lines, slim trousers, soft tailoring built to drape. Hardware stays low. Branding stays off. The argument is that the weather is the print, and printing on top of weather is too loud.
The brand lets the season finish its clothes, then takes the credit.
The Splendid EditWhy Florence
Pitti Uomo is the menswear week that buyers go to before Milan. The fair runs four days at the Fortezza da Basso, a fifteenth-century fortress on the edge of Florence's historic centre, and pulls about 720 exhibiting brands across its halls. The special-guest slot has been the part of the calendar Pitti uses to argue that menswear has new authors outside the European houses. Simone Rocha will close that argument on the runway. JiyongKim makes it inside a quieter room.
The exhibition format also fits a label that does not produce in volume. A Sun-Bleach piece takes months to finish. The studio cannot turn out a four-season runway show in the rhythm a major maison would. A room of pieces, treated, named and explained, is closer to the way the label actually works.
South Korean menswear has had quiet years on the European calendar. Wooyoungmi shows in Paris, Juun.J has dropped in and out, Ordinary People sits inside Seoul Fashion Week. JiyongKim arrives at Pitti without a runway lineage and without a houseful of categories. The cards line up around a single technique and the months it takes to do it.
What sits on the racks on the 17th will be a year of weather and three weeks of cutting. Whatever the buyers take back to Seoul, Milan and Paris afterwards is the only number the brand needs to defend.
JiyongKim, Pitti Uomo 110, Magazzino 07, Fortezza da Basso, Florence, June 16 to 19, 2026. Presentation Wednesday June 17. Details at pittimmagine.com and jiyongkim.com.
Photography courtesy of the LVMH Prize · Designer portrait, 2024 semifinalist archive