IF YOU HAPPEN TO BE in the market for a python jacket, Corneliani will be glad to sell you that very thing next spring. Last week during Pitti Uomo, the world’s largest men’s clothing trade show, held in Florence, Italy twice a year, the 50-year-old brand previewed a scaly yet bizarrely soft python jacket, in not one but three colors. It will set you back about $10,000. Not quite luxurious enough for you? You’re in luck: Corneliani also makes a full nubuck crocodile jacket for $62,000.
If this sounds like a dispatch from another planet (or at least another tax bracket) that’s because it is. Call it Planet Money. While much of men’s clothing is shifting towards the casual, the affordably understated and the sweatpant-ed (think Everlane and Entireworld), I discovered during my visit to Pitti Uomo that certain brands—Corneliani, Brunello Cucinelli and Stefano Ricci, to name three—are moving in the opposite direction, doubling down on luxury. The market for their designs is self-selecting; only those who can spend extravagantly need apply. And according to the brands, the applications are coming in fast and furious.
“If you have these [high-end] garments in the store, it’s like honey for the bees,” explained Stefano Gaudioso Tramonte, the creative director of Corneliani. Most mannequins were outfitted in supple (and seriously expensive) deerskin loafers; raincoats also came with deerskin epaulets (actual rain be damned). For the aging hypebeast who has outgrown his Alpha Industries bomber jacket and just sold off his startup Corneliani’s take on the bomber comes in a salmon-colored silk.
Stefano Ricci, the homegrown brand that’s been honing its Midas touch for over 46 years, showed its own reptilian zip-up at the fair: a crocodile-paneled motorcycle jacket with a hand-printed silk lining that costs around $30,000. “A lot of our customers still want the rich look,” explained Filippo Ricci, the business’s creative director. “We have a very strong base.” In 2017, Stefano Ricci’s revenue was up 14% from the year before and it opened up four new stores, with five more to come in 2018, including one in Macau and one in Miami. At any of Stefano Ricci’s 61 stores, fans will soon be able to buy the Swarovski crystal-encrusted neckties on display at Pitti Uomo (for when you “want to go and shine a place,” said Mr. Ricci). The tie de resistance, however, is coated in 100 diamonds and retails for about $70,000. The brand has only ever sold seven of these excessive accessories.
Perhaps this trend toward extreme luxury reflects a craving for formality among designers and their customers in the face of hoodie culture. As I walked the fair, I was struck by the amount of rack space dedicated to tuxedos, the quintessentially elegant men’s garment and one that even average sorts might invest in. “We are selling very well double-breasted [tuxedos] for weddings,” explained Giovanni Bianchi, the creative director of Italian label Luigi Bianchi Mantova, which now derives 22% of its American sales from formalwear, though it only introduced the category in 2015. Mr. Bianchi’s brand was one of several tailoring-minded labels (others include Sartorio and Australia’s Patrick Johnson) that showed a good number of tuxedos in fairly conservative forms. Mercifully, I was spared the sight of a sweatsuit tuxedo, but there’s always next season.
Write to Jacob Gallagher at Jacob.Gallagher@wsj.com