MILAN – The 2025 LVMH Prize for Young Designers winner Soshiotsuki by designer Soshi Otsuki will be a guest designer at the upcoming edition of Pitti Uomo, slated for Jan. 13 to 16.

The Japanese designer is to present his men’s fall 2026 collection at the leading menswear trade fair with a fashion show.

Mentioning a previous experience in an undisclosed Italy-based fashion contest, Otsuki said in a statement that “at the time, I felt that Japan’s somber atmosphere did not quite belong under the bright Italian sky, and perhaps I gave up on the idea. Now, more than a decade later, I am deeply honored to be able to present a show here in Florence. I am curious and excited to see how Soshiotsuki’s clothing will resonate under the Italian sky today.”

The 35-year-old designer, a graduate of Bunka Fashion College, also attended Coconogacco, the private fashion school that is producing some of Japan’s most exciting new talents. Shortly after launching Soshiotsuki in 2015, he was short-listed for the 2016 LVMH Prize.

Since then, he has refined his signature blend of Japanese and Western menswear codes, and gained cult status for his oversize suits inspired by ‘80s-era Giorgio Armani. Suit linings are slashed in reference to kimono sleeves, while some jackets are wrapped like karate uniforms.

At the 2025 LVMH Prize for Young Designers, he beat more than 2,300 applicants of 115 nationalities, walking away with a grand prize of 400,000 euros, plus a year of coaching from experts at luxury giant LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton, parent of brands including Louis Vuitton, Dior, Loewe and Celine.

“Meeting Soshi Otsuki in Tokyo, stepping into his world and feeling such a natural sense of affinity left us with no hesitation: We immediately offered him a premiere at the January edition of Pitti Uomo,” said Francesca Tacconi, special events coordinator at the fair’s parent Pitti Immagine.

“In Soshi’s work, one perceives an ideal of ambitious clarity, rooted in an ongoing dialogue with a millennia-old tradition yet imbued with a modern sartorial awareness. These are worlds that coexist and intertwine. It’s a concept of Made in Japan filtered through the lens of Made in Italy: a reference to the years of the ‘baburu keiki’ [Japan’s economic bubble in the mid-1980s], when men in Tokyo dressed in Armani, and dressed Italian. Yet, the language is contemporary and decidedly anti-nostalgic, recoded according to the desires of the present, with an understated but effective commercial sensibility,” she said.

Otsuki has also created the outfits worn by models in the Pitti Uomo’s campaign for the January edition centered on the theme of “Motion.”

The announcement marks the first of several special projects expected to be unveiled in the lead-up to the menswear fair. The Japanese brand follows in the footsteps of Homme Plissé Issey Miyake, Niccolò Pasqualetti, MM6 Maison Margiela, Setchu, Marine Serre, Martine Rose and Grace Wales Bonner, among others, as a guest designer of the men’s trade fair.

The full roster of initiatives will be revealed during a press conference in Milan scheduled for Nov. 5.