MILAN — Homme Plissé Issey Miyake is leveraging the Pitti Uomo stage to spotlight the history and craft of its signature pleats.

The Japanese brand part of the Miyake universe is to mount an exhibition during Pitti Uomo to coincide with its spring 2026 show as a guest of honor at the menswear trade fair, WWD has learned. The announcement is to be made Thursday during Pitti Uomo’s luncheon in New York.

The special event is to be held on June 18, the trade show’s second day, at Villa Medicea della Petraia, a 14th-century hillside estate overlooking the city of Florence from its lush gardens that once belonged to the Medici family.

“We feel grateful for this opportunity to be featured at one of the most celebrated menswear events around the world. We will present our spring 2026 collection to a local and international audience in Florence, created based on our research and field studies conducted during our visits to many places in Italy,” the Homme Plissé Issey Miyake design team remarked in a statement.

Pitti Uomo marks the first stop in the new roving show format the brand announced earlier this year. “The brand will travel around the world to present its clothing in places and at events where it has never been before, meeting local communities and connecting with a global creative scene,” the statement continued.

A favorite amongst fashion professionals and fashionistas alike, Homme Plissé Issey Miyake was established in 2013 as the menswear counterpart to Pleats Please, the womenswear, pleat-centric brand introduced in 1994.

Issey Miyake’s signature pleats first appeared in the Japanese brand’s main collection in 1988 before it jumpstarted dedicated lines. They are achieved through a dedicated machinery that applies the pleats to the flat, final garment, thus reducing textile waste, as well as the need of seams. Pleats in the Homme Plissé and Pleats Please collections differ from one another.

“We have long hoped to associate the name of the great Japanese master with our event,” said Raffaello Napoleone, chief executive officer of Pitti Imagine, the menswear trade show’s operator. “This is our way of recognizing and celebrating the quality, creativity and originality of the brand, its success on a global scale — and, at the same time, highlighting the brand’s current creative direction, which has successfully reinterpreted the quiet, elegant magic of its founder: one of the designers, one of the artists, who marked the history of fashion in the 20th century,” he said.

Homme Plissé Issey Miyake has unveiled its new collections during Paris Men’s Fashion Week since 2019, oftentimes mounting performance shows that have been a favorite among showgoers.

Last January the brand skipped its Paris show ahead of the roving format announcement. Its spot in the city’s fashion week calendar was replaced by Issey Miyake’s four-year-old IM Men line, which, as reported, was created in 2021 with the aim to develop clothing that integrates design and engineering.

As reported Monday, Pitti Uomo, which runs June 17 to 20, announced South Korean brand Post Archive Faction, known as PAF, as a guest designer of the upcoming show. On Thursday it also said Italian up-and-coming designer Niccolò Pasqualetti will be a guest designer of the fair.