The invite came in the form of a vintage postcard from LA. The backdrop was an old cigar factory that looked just like a Hollywood back lot or a Broadway stage. With classic show tunes playing as guests took their seats, it seemed like Scott Sternberg had taken his invitation to be guest designer at the 80th edition of Pitti Uomo in Florence, Italy as an excuse to celebrate America's historical global domination of the business of show. And there was no doubt about it once the spotlights dimmed, the classic intro from West Side Story's "Jet song" clicked into gear, and energy erupted as rival teams of dancers expertly re-created that musical's gang warfare scenario. Pitti offers guest designers an opportunity to be creative for the sheer merry hell of it, and Scott Sternberg stretched it to the limit. His years of toil in Hollywood left him with a fully evolved impresario gene, but his presentations in New York have often been master classes in extracting maximum impact from minimal settings. Here, however, he let his inner Busby Berkeley fly, so enthusiastically that it felt like something he'd been dying to do for years. Even the process of casting his Italian dancers was, according to the designer, like something out of A Chorus Line. "Indulging my boyhood fantasies", he called it. There were three collections of clothing integrated into the spectacle : the men's range for SS12, the Resort looks for Boy (i.e. the women's range), and a handful of outfits from Girl. Maybe it was the Italian setting, but Scott Sternberg's revisioning of the all-American boy had a distinct hint of the Via Veneto : the trim white suit, the double-breasted blazer over white jeans, the double-breasted pinstripe, the sunglasses at night, and the ice creamy color accents told a retro Euro-tale. The hoodies, the cutoffs, and the zinced lips felt much closer to home. This retro-influenced collection had all of the trappings of a sock hop : rolled-up skinny pants, cool varsity jackets and colorful zip hoodies, all with a modern feel. The first BoO jean also was shown. If there was a significant development, it was surely in the sizing, more generous to reflect Band of Outsiders' burgeoning growth.
