Founded: 2009
Founder & Designer: Umit Benan
First Collection: Fall/Winter 2009–10, Day 77
B+ launched: 2019
2009 — UMIT BENAN is founded, making its debut with menswear defined by strong characters and narrative-driven collections.
2011–2013 — Umit Benan serves as Creative Director of Trussardi.
2016 — Following his Fall 2016 show in Paris, Benan steps away from the conventional fashion system for a time.
2018 — He makes a measured return with God Is Black (Pt. 1).
2019 — He launches B+, a smaller-scale tailoring project centered on a more direct relationship with the people who wear the clothes.
On a Umit Benan runway, the man often seems to arrive before the clothes do. A banker, a soldier, an athlete, a fisherman. One season may evoke a man from an urban workplace; another shifts toward the sea, the military, or a distant landscape. At times, it feels less as though models are walking a runway than as though men from entirely different lives have somehow stepped into the room. Benan’s starting point has rarely been the shape of a jacket alone, but the question of who this man is, where he comes from, how he stands, and how he lives.
The clothes are built around that imagined life. Softly constructed jackets, generously cut trousers, elements drawn from sportswear and military dress, everyday garments carrying traces of a particular place or culture. Rather than forcing the body into a predetermined silhouette, Benan leaves room for the wearer to give the clothes their final shape through the way he stands, walks, and sits. His casting has often followed the same instinct, bringing in men whose age, build, or faces suggest lives beyond the runway. For Benan, clothing has never been entirely separate from the person inside it.
Over time, that interest moved closer to real life. With B+, Benan stepped away from the conventional seasonal cycle and turned toward tailoring, made-to-measure, and a more direct relationship with the people who would actually wear his clothes. The emphasis shifted from making an impression for the few minutes of a show to making something that might remain in a wardrobe for years and be worn again and again. It feels less like a change of direction than a continuation of the question that had been there from the beginning: who will live in these clothes?
In recent collections, that attention has grown quieter still. Familiar materials—cashmere, wool, silk, denim—are explored through touch, layering, washing, and subtle changes in finish. The forms themselves retain the foundations of classic menswear, with little need for spectacle. Yet the same garment can look entirely different from one wearer to the next, because the generous proportions allow posture, movement, and presence to remain visible.
If the early Umit Benan collections invented entire lives for the men who wore them, the more recent work seems to have moved those stories into a smaller, more intimate space: a single person’s wardrobe. Less concerned with novelty than with what remains over time, Benan’s clothes allow the wearer to become clearer rather than disappear behind them. The method has changed, but that idea has stayed remarkably constant.