Umit Benan (Q8032)
Jump to navigation
Jump to search
Umit Benan is a fashion house from BOF.
| Language | Label | Description | Also known as |
|---|---|---|---|
| English | Umit Benan |
Umit Benan is a fashion house from BOF. |
Statements
Hiding in plain sight. To enter Umit Benan’s laid-back mellow showroom, you had to go through an imposing steel door. Behind it, a getaway from Milan’s chaotic environment—warm, cozy furniture and a little nested courtyard full of greenery that gave way to a discovery of finely tailored garments that complemented the setting perfectly. “We are notquiet luxury,” the designer pointed out. “We have a California attitude visible in the silhouettes paired with an Italian product that’s synonymous with the highest quality.” The winds of change are blowing at Umit Benan; if previous seasons were inspired by precise characters—especially from Latin America—now luxury remains the truefil rouge,with less creativity involved and more bespoke approaches implemented.“I had completely lost the relationship with the client,” Benan explained of his new focus on building a wardrobe tailored to his shoppers. The relaxed fit remains a relevant trait, but it can now get customized to the wearer: Based on word-of-mouth marketing alone, this service now accounts for almost 60% of his business. That’s part of what brought the designer to open a retail space in the center of Milan, which he hopes to have up and running by next December. The shop will be divided into two different areas. One will be dedicated to selling the seasonal collection, while the other will be an appointment-only studio that will also include bar services and personal styling.Innovations at Umit Benan include an interest in denim too. “We tried to design a few jeans prototypes, but none of them completely convinced,” Benan revealed. “I am looking for a gap—whether it’s in washes or silhouettes—to be filled in the market.” There was a renewed approach to knitwear as well: By working with one of the five factories in Italy that do circular knitting, Benan introduced jersey characterized by fluidity and lightness without using elastane.With a color palette of predominantly tomato red and azzurro, inspired by the ’80s, these less saturated tints conveyed airiness and paired perfectly with the designer’s loose silhouettes. The addition of black and white created harmony, while he played with textures that conveyed brightness. Specifically, his use of mixed fibers, like linen mixed with silk or wool, or cotton mixed with silk, which were among the favorites in the collection.
23 September 2024
Umit Benan presented his luxurious B+ line right after Milan Fashion Week. His aim with B+ is to offer impeccable quality and made-to-measure service. Benan is deeply fascinated by Italian and Japanese fashion of the 1980s—he mentioned names such as Armani, Ferré, Miyake, and Yamamoto during a showroom visit—and that’s why his silhouettes are soft and relaxed with an obsessive attention to movement, crucial to enhance the incredibly refined fabrics he chooses.This collection reflects his life as a dad, and is divided into different occasions distinguished by a specific tone-on-tone color palette. Cold tones such as gray are for daily life—especially in the gray weather of Milan—while warm ones are for weekends in the countryside. All the white proposals are for the mountains and the black ones are more formal attire.Everything is apparently very simple, but on closer look, sophisticated details can be discovered. In addition to those Italian and Japanese greats, Benan was also looking at the way John F. Kennedy Jr. wore very classical clothes with a young twist. A Neapolitan coat’s proportions were reworked to look wider and cashmere was spun like a jersey to resemble a sporty hoodie. He also renewed a traditional blazer by designing it with a removable internal structure that lets the wearer cover up his neck.
1 February 2024
Umit Benan has finally completed the home of B+ Umin Benan, the brand he created after the pandemic in order to “restart from the customer,” as he puts it. The atelier-slash-shop has an almost hidden entrance, located within a concrete courtyard that doesn’t give away anything about what’s inside.Inside the warm, open space, Benan works with customers one-on-one. They’re mostly men, and a few women who like their tailoring with a man’s fit. His shapes are still inspired by the Italian formal suit: the work of designers like Gianfranco Ferré, Giorgio Armani, Nino Cerruti, and Antonio Fusco has always been a reference point for him. But the colors and materials are at the discretion of his clients.“I love the Latin-American culture, Acapulco [the city],Blow[the movie], and Andy Garcia. If you look at the vintage movie icons of that geographic area, all characters are dressed like this,” he says, gesturing to the colorful racks. “During the ’60s in Cuba a very virile man would wear a pink silk shirt, it was just normal.”The collection balances on that line through caftans, silk shirts, and linen dresses rich with details, like the pocket stitched to separate eye glasses and cigar. The beauty is in the variety of fabrics and techniques, an exclusive service that turns one-off customers into regulars, Benan says.
20 June 2023
In 2017 Umit Benan came to the conclusion that he needed a break. He gathered his ideas away from the pressure that managing a brand brings, including all the commercial and admin responsibilities. Often, especially in smaller businesses, these aspects are part of the creative’s job, sometimes causing breakdowns. Benan, however, never stopped creating clothes and is now coming back with a new project: B+, a high-end unisex line that he describes as the result of his working as a “tailor/designer.”The collection starts with the classics because, Benan says, it’s easier not to lose one’s path that way. The research is all in the materials, rigorously made in Italy by star producers who supply top formalwear brands with the finest cottons, wools, and silks. There are cashmere coats and blazers, waterproof silk casual jackets, bow-tie-neck shirts that don’t need any additional accessories, and tuxedos with removable panels. The volumes are notable: A round-neck sweater, for example, is not just a classic round-neck sweater; it has a slight slouchy quality that retraces the aesthetic DNA of the designer. The same approach can be found in the dresses.Benan’s mission to help his clients build “the ideal wardrobe” will be furthered once he starts offering custom-made clothes in a space he is finishing off in Milan. It’s part of a new direction, which the designer says is “the result of what I have learned from this business and also from myself.”
13 February 2023
It’s too darn hot for Umit Benan. On a visit to his Navigli studio today the designer was chomping moodily on a cigar and lamenting about how high the mercury here in Milan is rising. And yet, every cloud: arrayed on the rails behind him were some garments that cooled you down just by looking at them.Chief among them were his signature airy caftans in striped, light diaphanous cotton and a pant in dark navy or off white that had a vaguely workwear shape yet was delivered in leisure-centric pajama silk: really lush. There were also shirts and shorts in the same material to complete the triptych of too-hot go-tos. The long unisex skirts in a less delicate fabric were airy options too.Benan branched out into bolder color than previously via a vivid sunstroke red. It proved alarmingly attractive transmitted via his low-armholed, long-yoked shirts in silk and the powerfully precise Caruso-manufactured but Benan-specified suiting that is the bread and butter of this high-rolling brand. The designer said that around 40% of sales are now being generated by made-to-measure orders, increasingly in the US.Subtly applied except for one irresistible sailor hat was an undercurrent of maritime reference, mostly pant focused. Benan said he’d imagined himself off-duty in some Cuban port—Cuba is the starting point for the B+ aesthetic—watching shore leave visitors mingling with the local landlubbers. This led to the interestingly updated sailor pants, pleat fronted instead of flat, and some fetching scarf detailing on the shirting.Benan’s designs are gorgeously fashioned and meticulously thought through. They are also priced at a point that makes conveying their cost-to-value ratio near impossible via imagery alone: only when you touch, feel, and wear them do you understand. Hot stuff.
17 June 2022
As well as being a very knowledgeable soccer conversationalist, Umit Benan continues to be an extremely gifted designer. His studio on the southern fringes of thenaviglihints at wider passions too: great furniture, a (sadly, folded) ping-pong table, and multiple skateboards.Yet the center of Benan’s orbit remains his creation of uncompromisingly manufactured and painstakingly designed ultra-luxe clothing whose lineage is rooted in menswear but is also wearable by any gender. Following last season’s cigar-toned Cuban emphasis, Benan said he was upping the intensity of his color palette as evidenced by an ensemble of emerald cashmere shirt under a blue, black, and brown checked jacket north of some Bengal stripe cotton pajama pants alongside him.Supreme pieces here included a workwear jacket in double cashmere either in sunflower yellow or olive green that you would hesitate to do any but the gentlest of work in. These hung alongside same-fabric raglan overcoats; both were garments whose apparent simplicity, combined with the precious fabric, served to manifest rich sophistication. Stopping at a mustard/camel cashmere hoodie, Benan said: “at the end of day, I don’t want to mess too much with design. The emphasis is on great stuff, stuff that’s so great you want to come back and buy it again.”A loose-legged blue and white herringbone suit in silk/wool shown over another slouchy Bengal stripe underlayer was, in theory, a women’s look. It was also evidence of Benan’s ability to make clothes with a formal architecture appear almost slouchily deformalized. Pieces including a stiff British mohair covered-button jacket and a magnificent chocolate brown cashmere carried pomp without demanding ceremony. These are garments made for the niche of a niche in a niche—exclusive both in terms of price point and aesthetic. B+ was A+.
1 January 2022
A comely naked tattooed woman covered with sushi lay at the end of the runway, main course on a low table set for eight. The diners arrived in track pants and tank tops, knelt at their places, and got busy with their chopsticks. Around them emerged the looks in this irreverent and lovable loose homage to Japan andgaijinmisconceptions of it.Benan’s marvelously motley crew of street-cast models—some of them rustled up by the designer himself only yesterday—looked like bad-guy henchmen in a Parisian spaghetti kung fu flick:Big Trouble in Little French-Japan, maybe.A shearling judo jacket worn with a real judo jacket beneath it, a caramel biker whose ribbed hem was patterned to ape an obi belt, a herringbone judo suit, and a judo jacket in velvet sort of encapsulated the clothes. There were also plenty of fine and lustrous pants and coats in patterned corduroy and peacock feather velvet, as well as more tank tops and track pants. There were shoes, but after a while there weren’t; instead they wore white tube socks with the toes cut out. This was attire versatile enough to take you from dojo to dive bar via fistfight and strip club, and seemed especially well complemented by a vaguely sinister mustache. It was wrong—obviously—but right too.Benan said he had been inspired by his repeat visits—all 16 of them—to Tokyo last year during which he regularly observed students at a martial arts school wearing their gear on the street once classes had finished. It was also, he said, the result of a youth spent watching stylized violence on VHS; “Jean-Claude Van Damme, Tarantino . . .” While in Tokyo, had he ever eaten raw fish off a naked woman? “Never! But I always wanted to go.” Healthy food, ironically referenced out-of-date sexual politics, great clothes.
24 January 2016
Umit Benan said he's feeling "more open-minded, happier, lighter" these days—and not just because he has lost nearly 20 pounds. It was easy to see how jazzed he was by his new collection, Comandante, his latest meditation on masculinity. This one involved a little more fantasy—and fashion—than usual. Benan imagined Fidel Castro and Che Guevara, high on their victory over the dictator Batista, celebrating in a Havana nightclub over cigars and Cuba Libres (exactly what he did in his victory walk at the finale). He staged his show in a Peruvian restaurant on the outskirts of Paris. It looked right, like an old hotel in Havana. The models had an appropriately Latin appearance, too, although they were younger and slimmer than Benan's usual casting. "I wanted it to look a little morefashion," he said. And maybe that meant it was more commercial as well. "Every single piece has something very identifiable," Benan added, most significantly in the way he used piping to lend some summery definition.But more defining still were the military-ish details: the tailoring with the slouch of a well-worn uniform, the shirt jackets with lapels and bellows pockets, the desert boots, the Army green, the Air Force blue…and the designer made his own uniform out of mutant pinstripes. If there was a pajama-like ease to the clothes, Benan knows how to add just enough structure to secure shapely reassurance, as in the cream double-breasted at the end of the show. That said celebration. On Havana Club, of course.
28 June 2015
One of Umit Benan's most vivid memories of his childhood in Istanbul is of the fishermen who lined the Bosphorus, trying to land the evening meal for their families. He used to make his father drive him down to the water after school so he could watch them. "It was the only time you got to see men in modern, bright colors," Benan recalled after his show. "They'd be wearing technical clothes by Adidas or Nike, waterproof nylon in pink or yellow."The designer is a past master of catwalk theater, so his street-cast models—a little weather-beaten, a little greasy—brought a whiff of the Bosphorus to the presentation. Too much so for some audience members, who felt the waterproofs, the hats, the fishing rods and buckets and other fisherman-ly things added a distractingly costumey edge. But Benan has always been incredibly thorough in his effort to evoke what his show notes referred to as "bold, unabashed masculinity" (that army barracks scenario from Fall 2012 will linger in the memory as long as the mind is sound), and this outing guaranteed you'll never view anglers in the same light again, especially when Benan's teen idol, Jordi Mollà (so memorable as Johnny Depp's treacherous partner inBlow), ambled unpredictably toward the photographers.And minus the more specific all-weather items, like the tech cotton overalls and coats in lifeboatman yellow, the clothes actually made for a vintage Benan collection. He extends little effort to gel with whatever the prevailing trends in menswear may be, layering his own blend of functional sportswear with bold tailoring in deep, earthy tones that are distinctly his. A double-breasted suit in a graphic plaid is practically the designer's signature piece. Mollà wore a slouchy herringbone suit topped by a hooded leather jacket—a casual, unstructured attitude to dressing being another Benan signature. Silhouettes had as much substance as the sturdy classic fabrics the clothes were cut from. They were built for comfort, not for speed, and that spirit of generosity was mighty appealing in a cool-weather collection.
25 January 2015
Umit Benan played tennis as a kid, four times a week for ten years. He wanted to turn professional, until life got in the way. But when he called his show "Tennis Club de Cartagena, Colombia," it was scarcely Wimbledon, opening at the same time as the men's shows in Paris, he was thinking about. In typical Benan style, he had a dark, cinematic narrative in mind: the likes of Colombian coke czar Pablo Escobar on a tennis court, supremely powerful guys who go to a tennis club where they can wear shorts and play badly (both concessions to powerlessness, as far as Benan was concerned) in complete privacy. The meaty gents on Benan's catwalk, cast from the streets of Paris, looked likerealbad boys as opposed to the pallid wannabes who dominated shows this season.Tennis might have seemed like a way to put a new spin on the sportswear theme that dominates menswear for Spring 2015. Is there one designer whodidn'tshow a tracksuit this season or make trainers the shoe of choice? Benan was no exception, but his new collection also offered a refresher course in the qualities that make him a quiet force in men's fashion. He can cut a very appealing suit; he also knows how to twist something as basic as a polo shirt so it looks fresh, and there's a brazen sensuality about his clothes that gives their wearer a reassuring amount of credit for self-confidence. All those qualities were here today, along with Benan's usual artful reversibles (the suede blouson may be the best yet), canny sporty detailing like the elastic bands at wrists and snaps at ankles, and an absolutely individual color palette. According to Benan, his switch from Milan to Paris has brought "more luxury, more volume, more elegance" to his work. Fortunately, none of this has interfered with his ability to tell a story.
28 June 2014