Time to suit up

THE lexicon describing male shopping has been lately enriched with newly minted acronyms and portmanteaux, following in the vaunted (and derided) footsteps of "metrosexual" Bain & Co calls this spender-to-be Henry (High Earner, Not Rich Yet); the bank HSBC, more cringe-worthily, calls him a Yummy (Young Urban Male). But if you christen him, will he come? The largest players in the industry are hoping yes. "Finally the men's business is waking up," said Gildo Zegna, the chief executive of the Ermenegildo Zegna Group, one Saturday afternoon in his sunny office in Milan. "We're taking it more seriously. We're trying to make it more fun." In 2012, Zegna tapped Stefano Pilati, the respected but embattled former designer of Yves Saint Laurent, as head of design. His appointment capped a year and a half of designer moves. The year before, Kering, whose stable includes Gucci, Bottega Veneta and Alexander McQueen, had acquired Brioni, a Roman label known for its suiting, and hired Brendan Mullane away from Givenchy to design it.

Before that, LVMH - home of Marc Jacobs, Christian Dior and Louis Vuitton - hired Alessandro Sartori, then designing Zegna's younger-skewing Z Zegna, to create a full ready-to-wear collection for Berluti, its tony but dusty custom footwear label, and named Antoine Arnault - widely seen as a possible heir apparent to his father, Bernard Arnault, as the LVMH chairman and chief executive - to run it.

All three labels were previously known as bastions of traditional tailoring or shoes, classic but far removed from high-end fashion lines like Lanvin or Dior. Their recent changes effectively blur the once-clear line between "luxury" and "designer" menswear. The appointment of marquee designers poached from the world of runway fashion and the expansion of their once-narrow offerings to include everything from denim to bicycles signal the companies' desire to build these labels into full-fledged fashion brands - and to do so at an unapologetically luxurious price point. Now, the early fruits of that labour are entering the market, at newly built or newly refurbished stores.