Umit Benan Sold Stake to New Guards Group’s Cofounder Davide De Giglio

MILAN — After almost 15 years in business, striving for and thriving amid independence, Umit Benan sensed it was time to give his namesake brand some external fuel.

After pausing his conceptual menswear label in 2019, he resurfaced, quietly, with B+, a new line hinged on luxurious menswear conveying an attitude.

Now backed by an investor and partner — the first he’s ever had — he is ready to kick off a new phase and welcome a broader audience into his fashion vision under the Umit Benan brand.

“I want to make the best product that one can possibly take to market….Over the past 15 years, I’ve always been a designer brand, not a fashion brand,” he said, Zooming from his atelier on an early morning just after a workout.

Davide De Giglio — the cofounder of New Guards Group, who exited the company in June 2023, four years after the business was sold to Farfetch — quietly set up his boutique investment firm, D Capital.

The Umit Benan label represents the first M&A operation in the fashion space for D Capital, which acquired a 55 percent interest in the Umit Benan company through a capital increase aimed at ramping up the brand’s footprint and operations. Financial terms of the investment were not disclosed.

“Davide is no regular investor…[my brand] used to be a one-man show delivering high-quality product, now I’m backed by a structure. There are very few investors willing to add structure, they are generally more sales-driven,” Benan said. “I couldn’t be happier because I could hardly find a similar investor….My goal and Davide’s and the team’s goal is to reach product perfection,” the Turkish designer added.

Benan believes financial backing came knocking at his door — a Milanese-chic-meets-industrial-vibe space in southern Milan — when the time was right.

The first collection under the partnership will be for spring 2025 and will be unveiled starting Tuesday during Milan Fashion Week with a presentation at the company’s headquarters in tandem with the sales campaign.

The lineup offers a first glimpse into the expansion strategy the brand is plotting — toward new product categories and womenswear.

Take jerseys for one, with luxurious cotton and silk sweaters, hoodies, polo shirts and T-shirts. “It’s just very simple and minimal but so luxurious, the fabric’s hand is superb,” Benan said. Denim is also new to the line.

The spring 2025 collection marks a new chapter in the designer’s ever-expanding oeuvre. To be sure, anyone expecting a seasonal theme, or trend-driven pieces from the designer would be disappointed. What customers are buying is Benan’s ability to convey an attitude.

“Five years ago, I introduced five jackets and I’m still using the same five patterns and silhouettes,” the designer said. “Whenever we’re ready to introduce a new piece, [it’s because] we hope that it will carry us forward for the next 10 years.”

Benan’s fashion is very distinctive, built on his fixation for rebooting ’80s silhouettes — broad and boxy shoulders, longer jackets and pleated fluid pants — and a loose elegance which, he admits, is largely inspired by masters such as Giorgio Armani, Gianfranco Ferré and Nino Cerruti.

“I’m chasing a dream that I witnessed while I was growing up, of fabrics fluidly moving as the silhouette and the body moved. Everything was more luxurious, it was all in the garment’s movement,” Benan said.

He used the term “luxury” quite frequently while previewing the collection, likening it to the feeling clothes can evoke when worn. “It’s the movement and the flow between the skin and the fabric,” he said.

“Umit Benan’s about Italian product with an American flair, like you go skateboarding in a tailor-made suit,” Benan explained.

Working a palette of washed neutrals and pastels including tomato red, pink and blue, he said he tried to capture his archetypal visualization of Slim Aarons-esque summers.

After accruing fans among the wealthy managers and fashion executives who can afford 6,000-euro suits with hand-stitched buttonholes, Benan has struck a chord with a growing club of female customers, too, hence the womenswear move.

Benan has long provided female clients with the same tailoring experience the brand offers to men, without much tweaking. Starting with spring, the mannish fabrics and patterns will be plied into feminine creations, with dedicated styles, fits, button arrangements and details.

De Giglio — who has known Benan for a long time, since the very first Off-White and Palm Angels collections were unveiled more than a decade ago — characterized the designer’s fashion as “post ready-to-wear.”

“It’s a return to tailoring through the ready-to-wear lens and this is very much linked with Umit’s industrial network of suppliers, which contribute to the sartorial standing of textiles, colors, details, even though his garments are not one-of-a-kinds,” the executive said.

“When I visited his atelier and showroom 10 years later, I was struck by a couple of things: first his obsessive attention to details and quality and also his ability to build such a business alone, with only a small team of collaborators,” he explained.

Like many a fashion entrepreneur, De Giglio first became a client buying into Benan’s reinvention of the Power Eighties with a sensibility that’s all in the garment construction and painstaking sartorial precision.

“I realized Umit was just missing a big thing — which is often the case with creativity-led talents: a real distribution footprint,” De Giglio said.

“I like to call Umit’s business ‘the 15-year start-up’…and we believe we can help him embrace a path that he could do on his own but faster with us,” he said. As a result of the partnership, the brand has named Mattia Crepaldi, vice president and partner business development of D Capital, its chief executive officer.

According to De Giglio, the brand is viable for retail and wholesale expansion. “The company is mature enough to have an international appeal, but we’re kicking [expansion] off from Milan, because this is a true Milanese story,” the executive said.

A premium location on Milan’s Golden Triangle luxury shopping district has already been secured, the two partners said. “It’s Umit’s town,” De Giglio noted. “We’re hoping to open by the end of 2024 or early 2025.”

With his B+ brand, Benan had done baby steps into wholesale, selling his collections to Mr Porter, but the new business partner sees more opportunities in that space, too.

“Our goal is to reach about 50 to 70 doors and then develop retail. We think the Middle East and the U.S. are relevant target markets,” Crepaldi said. “We’re doing something phenomenal, and we have to gather the feedback from the market, which we think will respond [well] despite experiencing a difficult moment.”

D Capital is De Giglio’s new business venture after he cut ties with New Guards Group, fueled by the executive’s 30-year career in the fashion and lifestyle sector.

The firm boasts investment in beauty brands including Isamaya, of which it was a cofounding investor, and Rhode, as a seed investor, and helped set up the Eredi Zucca barber shop on Milan’s Via Bigli, a grooming venture resurrecting the storied firm originally established in 1652. D Capital has also invested in Volzhenka Caviar and Officina Profumo-Farmaceutica di Santa Maria Novella.