One of Italy’s most visible young brands, Magliano suddenly seems to be everywhere it matters – guest-starring at Pitti Uomo, winning a coveted LVMH Karl Lagerfeld Prize – but for Luca Magliano, his namesake fashion line is a project of protest. “Rage,” Magliano says, when I ask why he founded his own brand. He was an outsider for years, struggling to gain a position in the industry. “Don’t you see me and what I’m capable of?” he asked of the fashion system – but today, everyone in the fashion system has their eyes on him.

Sitting on the outdoor patio of a café near his three-person studio in Bologna, Magliano is straight-backed and intense, with an expressive, thick moustache and eyebrows, and still passionately furious. The designer spent years trying to break into some of the bigger brands but was constantly overlooked, so he remained in his hometown of Bologna, taking jobs at mid-level fashion companies to oversee their production at the many workshops spread across the surrounding region of Emilia-Romagna. But it was those factory connections and even his fury that turned out to be the keys to his independent success.

The fashion industry produces many of its garments and accessories just outside Bologna, the capital of a region of small towns that feel provincially far from the fashion world, Magliano says. Though he never fulfilled his original dream of a designer job in one of Europe’s fashion capitals, with his manufacturing expertise “I had everything I needed to start my brand” – including the trust of the factory owners he had worked with, who fabricated his first collections on credit.

Italian fashion is dominated by Prada, Gucci, Armani and other powerhouse luxury brands that congregate mostly in Milan, so with Bologna as a base Magliano was an outsider from the beginning. Bologna is also Italy’s most left-wing and politically vibrant city, with a well-entrenched anarchist and anti-establishment culture, and powerful queer and labour activism, among other movements – all of which fed Magliano’s ideas about creating “a left-wing fashion brand,” as he calls it. Like Yves Saint Laurent, “Bologna is my Rive Gauche,” he says – the progressive stronghold, which casts Milan as the Rive Droite of the establishment and big money. “Magliano is a fashion house of opposition, like Bologna is a city of opposition,” he says. “People are guided by an ideology here, which is not the case in Milan.”

The designer wears a heather-grey sweatshirt and ripped jeans with paintbrush marks down the legs from his own collection, part of an approach he calls “fucked-up classics.” With wardrobe staples as his starting point, he embeds new details to subvert their conventionality: a button-down with a silk scarf looping through well-placed cuts, a blazer closed with a messy clump of knots instead of buttons, jeans with a racy zipper opening on the derrière. It took some time after the brand’s launch in 2017 for the public to understand the style language he was creating, but his most recent runway show, at Florence’s Pitti Uomo in January, was widely hailed as the most exciting event of the week. There were relaxed suits created in collaboration with the high-tailoring atelier Kiton, and fedoras shorn of their brims made by Borsalino. Peerless craftsmanship, in other words, twisted into Magliano’s iconoclastic universe: “fucked-up classics” indeed. When the train of models descended the runway stairs together at the finale, they looked like an eccentric clique leaving a late-night club in London.

Magliano cites the provincia – the hinterlands, particularly its off-kilter 1980s-style glamour that existed far from Milan and Rome – as inspiration, alongside a series of writers including the poets Patrizia Cavalli and Sandro Penna and the novelist Pier Vittorio Tondelli: all queer writers of a previous generation whose work illuminated possibilities for the designer of how to carve out a life of freedom and creativity as a gay man in a closed-minded country, as he himself hopes to open doors with his fashion for a younger generation.

Queer representation has always been a part of Magliano’s politics, “but without having to unfurl a rainbow flag, without having to use symbols,” the designer says, slicing the air as he speaks. “I wanted to translate it into style terms. No one has a clear idea of what it means that something is queer, but we all know when something is bourgeois, we all know how a person dresses in order to be accepted,” aka, the opposite of Magliano. “You’ll never see us make a blue suit,” the symbol of men with office jobs in Italy, a culture in which getting dressed is more closely associated with propriety than self-expression and originality. “This whole bourgeois discourse wouldn’t be as important to me if it weren’t so important in Italy,” he declares. “It’s the things that I’ve hated that have brought me to this point of antagonism.”

Magliano’s clothes also embrace eroticism and even a level of shock. “If I make a jacket in crepe that drapes a certain way so you see your nipples – well, that’s not bourgeois,” he says. The importance of the body for the designer is embodied in binders – generally used for hiding and compressing breasts – a key Magliano piece on their own and now, for upcoming designs, worked into garments as well. “Clothing is a fundamental way to live within our own bodies in a different way,” he says.

“We’ve touched on the needs of a generation, and we’re helping to create a discourse for the fashion of the future,” the designer says of the brand, standing up to look around at his café neighbours before he leaves. “A project like this serves as a link between the past and the future” – a Rive Gauche of contemporary fashion. “We’ll probably never become a really major brand,” he says with one last angry slice at the air, “but nevertheless, we’re a laboratory for the things that need to happen next.” ◉