Meet the Milanese designer who has defied convention with his surprising use of fabrics.

It’s early October and at the Orto Botanico di Brera – a botanical garden in the shadow of Palazzo Brera, a museum belonging to the University of Milan – the first signs of autumn are beginning to show. The yellow, fan-shaped ginkgo trees are rustling, and in the still-warm air, the citrus scent of lemons mingles with the sweet smell of decay from the fallen leaves. Mr Massimo Piombo, stately in head-to-toe navy, shifts in his chair to better catch the dappled, mid-morning light. “You know what I like about this place?” he muses, gesturing to his surroundings. “It’s not perfect. It’s not a Four Seasons.”

For all that he travels – and he does, extensively, spending approximately 200 days away from home every year – Mr Piombo is unlikely to be spotted at a Four Seasons at any point in the near future. Nor should you expect to see him at the wheel of a Rolls-Royce or a Ferrari, he says. “For me, it’s a private jet or a Fiat Panda. Everything in between? Boring.” Mr Piombo lives to challenge preconceived notions of luxury, railing against ostentation, fussiness or anything that he sees as “troppo borghese” (too bourgeois). You get the feeling he is not like many other fashion designers. Through his eponymous menswear brand, which he founded in the late 1980s, and latterly through MP Massimo Piombo, he has spent the past three decades promoting an alternative vision of luxury: one that finds elegance in imperfection.

For an example of this, we need look no further than the man himself, who exudes that elusive quality known to the Italians as sprezzatura, perhaps best described as the art of looking like you haven’t tried too hard. It goes without saying that he is exceedingly well-dressed, but it is to the imperfections in his outfit that the eye travels first: a corner of blue shirt poking out from beneath his navy cashmere sweater, or a length of woven leather belt looped back behind his waistband. These little details imply that his style is innate, and that he requires very little thought to look this good. This apparent effortlessness, or “mask of sartorial nonchalance”, as it was once described by menswear writer Mr G Bruce Boyer, is at the heart of Mr Piombo’s brand.

Just around the corner from the botanical gardens is the MP Massimo Piombo store, where the brand’s vision finds a foothold in reality. It’s housed in a narrow, three-storey building that previously served as the workshop for the Italian architect Ms Gae Aulenti. The walls inside have been painted a deep shade of cobalt blue, and hot-house plants have been stuffed into every nook and cranny to create what Mr Piombo describes as “our own little jungle”. Each floor has a theme, beginning at the bottom with “glamour”, the designer’s take on the collegiate Ivy League look, before passing through “bizarre”, a more colourful selection on the second floor, and finally arriving at “obsession”, a range of dapper eveningwear aimed at an older, bolder customer. The term concept store doesn’t really do this place justice. A better way to describe it might be journey store. To ascend through its three floors is not just to take a trip through time – from preppy college student to elegant older man – but to trek across continents.

“Travel is at the heart of the MP Massimo Piombo brand,” says the designer, who has spent a great deal of his life travelling the world in search of the most exotic and beautiful fabrics. It began with a research trip to Edinburgh, Scotland, which was motivated by a desire to find something forgotten and somehow reinvent it. “I’d just graduated from university,” says Mr Piombo. “I was in my twenties, and I was trying to do the opposite of everyone else. If other designers were making big coats, I’d make them small. If they were making small coats, I’d make them big. I found a small archive of Scottish fabrics – herringbone tweeds, tartans – and it just went from there.”

His ultimate goal with MP Massimo Piombo, he says, is to bridge the gap between old and new, classic and contemporary. It’s an idea that first occurred to him several years ago in Tokyo during a conversation with Ms Rei Kawakubo, the founder of Comme des Garçons, who had just asked if she could stock the brand in her department store, Dover Street Market. “I couldn’t understand why she wanted Piombo overcoats in such a high-fashion store,” says Mr Piombo. “She told me that she actually considers it very fashionable, because it represents that link between traditional and contemporary.”

In a world where fashion moves so quickly that it can be almost impossible to keep up, Mr Piombo expects it will become increasingly important to find a balance between old and new. “The question is this,” he says. “Why would you even follow fashion now? It doesn’t make any sense, not when you have H&M and Uniqlo doing the same thing three months later for a tenth of the price. And this is now, in 2016. Think about what it’ll be like in 2016. Everyone will look exactly the same. It’s so boring.” The answer to this very modern problem, he claims, is to mix up what he calls a “Piombo cocktail”, a blend not just of traditional and contemporary, but of different styles, different tastes.

If he could offer one tip for creating the perfect cocktail, it’s to embrace the check. “It’s easy to wear plain colour,” says Mr Piombo. “Navy chinos, navy T-shirt, white sneakers… Sure, it looks good, but it doesn’t express your personality in any way. Throw on an overcoat in a check pattern, though, and immediately you feel different. Check is old-school, but still feels fresh. It’s smart, but it’s also a little bit punk.” While punk might not be the first word that springs to mind when you think of MP Massimo Piombo – the latest collection being conspicuously light on acid-wash denim and safety pins – there is more than a hint of mischief running through this brand, and the man who formed it. “Is Piombo punk? Sure. Why not?” he laughs. “Think of it as a private jet with a blue-and-yellow check interior.”

Shop the MP Massimo Piombo collection here