FLORENCE, Italy — "You know in cartoons, when a piano falls and there's, like, four keys sticking out," the model Charlie James said backstage at the Juun.J show here on Wednesday. "That's what my teeth were like."
Everybody needs a gimmick, and Mr. James's is, famously, his metal mouth. Scouted on the street in England, the 17-year-old met success so quickly that the orthodontics his agents prescribed unexpectedly became his calling card. In his freshman season alone, he was cast to appear on scores of runways in the major fashion capitals — Gucci to Dior Homme — and he was one of four token men in Karl Lagerfeld's brasserie-themed fall 2015 Chanel show, where he appeared alongside the Instagram prodigies Cara Delevingne (25.4 million — yes, million — followers, and counting) and Kendall Jenner (46.5 million, but you knew that).
A year later, Mr. James's teeth are straightened, yet he's still sporting a prosthetic grille.
Photo Charlie Jones before the Juun.J show. Credit Chris Warde-Jones for The New York Times"They're now being tightened the absolute minimum each time," he explained as a producer herded the models into a lineup for rehearsal. "My agents don't want me to take them out."
One of the wonders of fashion is how easily it lends itself to odd angles of approach. With an eye on emerging Asian markets, the organizers of Pitti Uomo — the men's wear trade show that draws as many as 35,000 international visitors to Florence every January and June — they invited Juun.J (pronounced June Gee; his real name is Jung Wook-jun) to present a men's wear collection, a stroke of timing that worked for all involved.
Samsung, the South Korean powerhouse behind Juun.J, has been looking to do some reverse colonization, expanding the international horizons of the designers it sponsors. "They want to make it like an Asian LVMH," said Jean Colin, a Samsung vice president for global expansion, referring to that mother ship of all multinationals, the Paris-based LVMH Moët Hennessy Louis Vuitton.
And it is well known that Lee Seo-hyun, the Parsons-educated second daughter of Samsung's chairman, Lee Kun-hee, has ambitions to grow the global fashion interests of the electronics giant. Who says the march of globalization can only tilt east?
A shy and diminutive man in his 40s, Juun.J is characteristic of a certain kind of journeyman in fashion. While he has won major prizes and held big-time jobs, he has never quite attained name-brand recognition outside South Korea. There, he enjoys cult status, based largely on men's wear designs that often resemble a form of armor. Certainly they did here at Pitti Uomo, where a posse of models — notably, all Caucasian — were dressed in skintight, motocross-style leathers and voluminous "Matrix" overcoats emblazoned with paintings of the erotic female robots drawn by the cult Japanese illustrator Hajime Sorayama.
Woven into the miles-long scarves draped over the models' shoulders, words like "Genderless" and "Boundaryless" seemed distinctly at odds with pinup images of female sex machines, but never mind. With r are exceptions (Rick Owens is one), the purchase most designers have on gender theory and cultural movements is, optimistically, notional. Genderless, Boundaryless, Whateverless: It's all the same to them.
Photo A style by Lukhanyo Mdingi and Nicholas Coutts, both from South Africa. Credit Chris Warde-Jones for The New York TimesAnd yet politics has a way of creeping in, particularly at Pitti Uomo, whose organizers have a longstanding commitment to the exploration of fashion's role in social change. If the fledgling designers invited to participate in a Generation Africa presentation — a spotlight event on the Pitti roster — were not quite prepared to contend on an equal basis with their North American and European competitors, their presence here alerted the assembled fashion news media to something global business has known for some time.
Many in the West persist in framing Africa exclusively as a continent troubled by "crisis and problems," said Simone Cipriani, founder of the Ethical Fashion Initiative, which organized the show of workmanlike clothes by the South Africans Keith Henning and Jody Paulsen; of outfits marrying blanket woolens with sophisticated woven elements by Lukhanyo Mdingi and Nicholas Coutts, also from South Africa; of frankly political patterned apparel by the Nigeria-born, Philadelphia-based attorney Wale Oyejide; and of Gozi Ochonogor's deceptively simple suits.
Photo During the Generation Africa presentation, a style by Keith Henning and Jody Paulsen, also from South Africa. Credit Chris Warde-Jones for The New York Times"Africa is about innovation," Mr. Cipriani said. And while one would not necessarily have guessed that from the show here — unnecessarily tame given that the designers had little to lose by taking risks — Generation Africa betokened a crucial fact about the region.
"As much as 70 percent of the population is under 30," Mr. Cipriani said. In market terms, at least, Africa is next.
