Massimo Bizzocchi: For 30 Years, a Peerless Advocate for European Style
With distinctive flair for 30-plus years, Bizzocchi brings Italy’s finest: Kiton, Lorenzini, Avon Celli, Lattanzi to North America
NEW YORK - The city’s newest high-end fashion retail entry has a familiar name - Massimo Bizzocchi - and it has turned up in New York’s hottest retail neighborhood, the Meat Packing District.
Bizzocchi, who for 30 years has built a peerless reputation as a fashion importer, agent, designer, international businessman and advocate for sophisticated European style, is adding a new title: boutique fashion retailer. He has opened his first store, the eponymous Massimo Bizzocchi, in the gritty-chic Meat Packing district, New York’s hottest fashion neighborhood, in the shadow of the historic High Line.
For most of his career, Bizzocchi has been a leader in helping cultivate both taste and appreciation for Italian luxury menswear, bringing the sophisticated tailored clothing name of Kiton to North America’s leading retailers, including Bergdorf Goodman, Wilkes Bashford, Louis Boston, Neiman Marcus and Barneys New York.
At the same time, Bizzocchi has cultivated interest in other Italy-based designer and luxury lines, almost all characterized by artisanal hand-craftsmanship and generations-old family ownership and management. “It has been my great pleasure to represent Kiton and other companies that are, to my way of thinking, Italian national treasures,” says Bizzocchi. “They produce wonderful products, in a way that speaks of artistry and artisanship, while commerce and commercial considerations have rarely, if ever, figured in their business decisions.”
Indeed Kiton has exercised the ultimate luxury: making something beautiful and luxurious just because they care to, fully confident that somewhere someone will appreciate a suit, a coat, a shoe, a tie so beautiful. As visionary retailers have embraced Italian products, a love affair for the last 30 years, Bizzocchi’s own business has moved steadily ahead. As discerning as he is in designing and merchandizing, he has been just as prudent in partnering with North America’s leading retail merchants.
“I have been very lucky to work with visionary retailers whose love of beautiful things is rare,” Bizzocchi says. “It’s a select list of individuals with great taste who take fashion risks but who always want the best for their customers.” Part of his success, no doubt, owes not only to the product and artisanal production, but to Bizzocchi’s own ability to romance the fashion items he represents. An individual with his own incomparable style, he has passionately worked, often with one store owner or a single customer at a time, logging thousands of miles between his native Italy and New York, and making countless appearances in stores and at trunk shows to share his wealth of knowledge and deep passion for the art of dressing.
Through the years, he has also turned out his own collection. Starting with neckwear -- ties so luminescent they can light up a room to say nothing of the faces they adorn -- Bizzocchi has applied his own sophisticated point of view developing clothing, dress and sport shirts, sportswear, outerwear and luggage. He has designed and marketed his signature line of ties for 10 years. Working with mills in Como and a small (six women) cutting and sewing atelier in Sarsina, Italy, Bizzocchi’s ties have a number of distinctive elements, including the braided silk thread that holds them together as a spine and the button hole on the back loop for affixing to the shirt. Both the button hole and braided silk spine act to give the tie extra life.
Massimo Bizzocchi builds his sport and dress shirts with fabrics from Pontolambro. Shirt details include flap pockets, hidden button-down collars and hidden button cuffs. Shirts are cut shorter and tails are not extended so they can be worn as dress or sportswear.
Bizzocchi’s signature clothing line combines the best of Italian style at the millennium and old-world New York tailoring as practiced by the inimitable Martin Greenfield. The collaboration is a reflection of Bizzocchi’s own worldliness, as he has split his career between Italy and New York. Greenfield, who is based in Williamsburg, Brooklyn, and runs one of the last great domestic tailoring operations, cuts and sews the Massimo Bizzocchi suits, sport coats and outerwear to the designer’s specifications.
“The clothing is wonderful,” says Greenfield, the legendary tailor. “It’s the best intrinsic value for the dollar because it has Italian styling and real quality stitch by stitch.”
Distinctive features include coats with two-tone linings and multiple pockets. Jackets have a locker loop and working buttons. Trousers have lap seams and some are styled with side tab waists. As with all Bizzocchi’s designs and products, no detail is too small. In his trousers, for instance, Bizzocchi uses cotton shirt fabric for a curtain inside the waist band and they are lined to the knee.
For more information, please contact Dan Wolman at 917-553-6746.