Neither the high winds that diverted flights past Florence’s airport to nearby regional cities like Bologna or Pisa, nor security jitters that led to undercover patrols and sniffer dogs policing the streets near major monuments deterred the flocks of peacocks who descended on this city this week for the huge men’s wear fair Pitti Uomo.

“We’re really quite surprised, to be honest, how many people came,” Raffaello Napoleone, the fair’s director, said of an estimated 30,000 visitors.

While exhibitor numbers have climbed steeply over the past several years — 1,219 labels are now represented here, close to 50 percent of them international — geopolitics have a way of wreaking havoc on commercial expectations. In recent years, the ruble collapsed and the Russians stayed home; then the renminbi fell into a ditch, taking with it the free-spending Chinese and the global markets. It turns out people have had more important concern ... Read more »