Nor is it only men’s wear that gets an airing at Pitti. On the other side of the river, Massimo Giorgetti presented for his first outing as creative director of Emilio Pucci a capsule of women’s looks (and a few men’s) that he called “The Pilot Episode.”

There were also cute tweaks on house traditions, like the silk shirt that now twisted and tied around the body, and scarf prints done on crepe-thin leather. In substituting “cute” for “sexy,” the Pucci byword under its previous creative director, Peter Dundas, Mr. Giorgetti moved the needle, a change ratified by a new logo, designed in just two days. But when congratulated on this new Pucci, Ms. Pucci demurred.

Mr. Tait, the first winner of the LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers, was Pitti’s invited guest for women’s wear this season. Many such guests choose to show their latest wares, which for women’s designers means pre-collections styles. Not Mr. Tait.

They saw a collection whose streetish, sporty feel was highlighted by models carrying surf- and skateboards, as if ready to hop into the Arno and hope for a wave. (Extra credit if you spotted that one of the models was Nick Wooster, the bearded avatar of Pitti.)

The current issue, No. 21, which has the 30-year-old Irish designer Jonathan Anderson on the cover, has a more relaxed, cleaner look that may go unnoticed to the casual page flipper, but its new sans-serif font, scrapbooklike use of blank pages, vertical masthead and yellow paper stock that divides the magazine into sections are something of a small revolution for devotees.

“I want people to understand that you can always push it forward,” Mr. Tait said. “These are things that you have a longstanding interest in, whether it’s creative or technical.” The presentation, he added, was “a bit of a comment on the industry, how many collections are busted out in six weeks.”

“They are trying to break the mold and find people who are incredibly interesting and not the 10 celebrities that are rotating on the same magazines because they have a new movie, ” said the photographer Inez van Lamsweerde, who along with her partner, Vinoodh Matadin, photographed Antony Hegarty, Stefano Pilati and others for the magazine. (The couple even appeared on the cover of issue No. 6 in 2007.)

Francesco Vezzoli, the provocative artist and caricaturist, said that the publication “wanted to change our perception of masculinity in a serious, groundbreaking way.”

Mr. Jonkers, a former culture critic for De Volkskrant, a left-leaning Dutch newspaper, interviewed Mr. van Bennekom for an article, and the two found that they shared a similar publishing vision. Mr. Jonkers ended up hiring Mr. van Bennekom as a graphic designer for a lifestyle magazine called Blvd.

This European-based fashion magazine, which publishes twice a year, continues to be a much-imitated scripture of men’s style, even as it celebrates its 10th anniversary. And that’s largely thanks to its two spotlight-shy Dutch founders, Jop van Bennekom and Gert Jonkers, who ushered in a genre of fashion magazines that emphasized everyday men and intellectuals, over celebrities and waifish models.

In any case, it’s just the pilot, and as any TV obsessive knows, between the pilot and the first episode — in this case, to be revealed during Milan Fashion Week in September — much can change.

So original pieces from as far back as his second collection, for fall 2011, were displayed alongside rich new versions, displayed museum-style, with clear identifications of the factories and companies that produced them. A biker jacket in white leather lined in pink silk from spring 2012 was pretty but spectral; a new version, in screaming-red, double-faced bonded patent leather lined in plongé, was spirit made lusty flesh.

“You guys applauded this,” he said, “I wasn’t necessarily happy. You don’t have this luxury at the time, to redo.”

The photography has stood out, too. Cover subjects have leaned toward mature, accomplished men like the actor Christoph Waltz, the tennis star Boris Becker, the author Bret Easton Ellis and the artist Jeremy Deller. Fashion spreads have featured real-life deliverymen. And many of the fashion editorials are in black and white, shot by photographers like Alasdair McLellan, Bruce Weber and Wolfgang Tillmans.

Dressed in a red polo shirt by Cos, with a single silver hoop earring, Mr. van Bennekom came across like a boyish fashion professor, making lofty pronouncements one moment and off-the-cuff jokes the next.

Imitation may partly be an impetus for why the two men behind Fantastic Man continue to expand their reach beyond the increasingly homogeneous world of “beards, tattoos, hats, glasses, suits and bow ties,” as Mr. van Bennekom likes to put it (and which he ironically has helped to create).

“It’s a very smart way to start a new story,” Mr. Giorgetti said with due respect for TV executives. “You go out with a pilot and you observe what happens.”

•

The writer Glenn O’Brien once called it “one of the most remarkable magazines of this era.”

Its arch, knowing editorial voice was also refreshingly authentic and noncommercial. There were in-depth interviews with male celebrities like Ewan McGregor who did not necessarily have something to promote, probing conversations with fashion designers like Tomas Maier and grooming tips from men as diverse as Giorgio Armani and the writer Peter York.

And in October, Phaidon is scheduled to publish a survey of Fantastic Man. There is also the growing network of Club Butt, a Facebook-like digital community for the Butt demographic, as well as a fragrance with Byredo, a pair of Gentleman’s Jeans with Acne, and even a line of mesh underwear with the Swedish label the White Briefs.

Not bad for soft-spoken editors who started with a playfully perverse pink-colored gay zine.

Although its print run was just 20,000, Fantastic Man arrived with a splash. With its formal two-column layout and bookish engravers-gothic font, it looked more like a foreign policy review than a glossy fashion rag.

FLORENCE, Italy — During the Pitti Uomo trade show, men’s fashion is unavoidable. It spills into the streets, busy with the double-breasted jacket brigade. At the sacred aperitivo hour in the Piazza Ognissanti, the crowds sipping spritzers on the terrace of the St. Regis hotel were treated to an alfresco fashion show by Ports 1961. Guests on a balcony of the nearby Westin Excelsior watched, too, and there were faces pressed to the windows at office buildings and residences around the square.

“No way, man,” he said when asked if his small showing — just seven new pieces — represented a resort line. “I think you can build a business on two seasons. I did one pre-collection, and it was a disaster. No one’s selling out of the pieces, to be frank. I’ll make more stuff when it sells out.”

In 2010, they started a sister publication, The Gentlewoman, devoted to those members of the opposite sex who relate more to the philosophy of Phoebe Philo than the shoes and handbags she produces at Céline.

But it was starting to feel like a cliché, so in 2005, they stopped the print version of Butt and started Fantastic Man to reach a wider audience. (Or, as Mr. van Bennekom jokingly put it, “because we couldn’t feature straight guys in Butt.”)

“I wouldn’t say we were bored with it, but I want it to be a magazine that changes,” Mr. van Bennekom said.

“It’s horrifying, as a young designer,” he said.

“We started the magazine because there wasn’t an organized form of gay counterculture like there is now,” Mr. van Bennekom said. “I think Butt created its own gay culture.”

Speaking over the phone from Amsterdam, Mr. Jonkers weighed in. “One of the things that Jop and I don’t like is this concept of ‘lifestyle,’ ” he said. “From the beginning, we’ve tried to do the opposite and be mesmerized by people, not by things. We want to know the things we don’t know yet.”

Actually, in his hands, more of a comedy. There are parallels between the candy-bright world of sitcoms and the world of fashion. (Alber Elbaz of Lanvin hit on the same idea when he staged what he called a sitcom for his resort presentation in New York this month.) Both depend on hitting your marks and nailing your punch lines with unforgiving regularity and at an antic pace; Laudomia Pucci, Emilio’s daughter and the company’s acting chief executive, noted the collection was put together in just six weeks.

The men that Butt featured in various states of undress were also notably older than the men featured in conventional gay magazines. “When we started, we hated this fetishization of youth that only appeals to eight stylists in the world,” Mr. Jonkers said.

Commercial suitors have now also come knocking. The two men also publish Cos Magazine, a brainy staple-bound journal by the Swedish fashion label Cos (a boutique offshoot of H M), and, in partnership with Penguin Books, The Happy Reader, a magazine devoted to the pleasures of paperbacks.

If Mr. Giorgetti’s pace is brisk, Thomas Tait’s is slow.

But perhaps its most notable influence can be seen on e-commerce sites, particularly Mr Porter, the luxury men’s wear retailer, which uses an identical engravers-gothic typeface and tongue-in-cheek formal tone. The similarities have not gone unnoticed.

On a recent trip to New York for a party in Bushwick, Brooklyn, that he was co-hosting, Mr. van Bennekom toasted his 45th birthday with Michael Bullock, Fantastic Man’s American director of advertising, and Mr. Bullock’s boyfriend, the artist Paul Kopkau, at the B Bar on the Bowery. (Mr. Jonkers stayed behind in Amsterdam.)

“It’s not mine,” he told one wayward admirer who was goggling over the suit. “You can buy it online. A whole outfit, only 86 quid!”

It was jolly, Mr. Giorgetti’s bright, young Pucci, if also a little silly. He bypassed Emilio Pucci’s famous optical prints for even older ones borrowed from the archive, and for his own, designed a tribute to Pucci’s native Florence. It featured the unbeloved crowds of tourists and local attractions like the Duomo and the Piazza della Signoria printed onto silk or embroidered onto dresses. There were little jokes scattered throughout, like a man whose gelato cone conveniently covered the David’s unmentionables, or the woman taking a picture with a selfie stick. “I can’t stop laughing when I see it,” Ms. Pucci said.

What obsessed him then obsesses him now. Mr. Tait is a perfectionist, as well as a technical whiz, who studied fashion technique and construction in Canada before studying design at Central Saint Martins in London.

Its influence can also be seen in advertising (where brands like Dunhill now cast “real” men like the architect David Adjaye in their ad campaigns) and fashion blogs. Fantastic Man could also be said to have foreshadowed the boom in street-style blogs like The Sartorialist.

“I think Fantastic Man caused a shift in publishing and men’s wear,” said Mr. Anderson, the current cover man. “You can see their influence coinciding with the importance of men’s wear throughout the fashion business. They have given fresh perspective by discovering men that you genuinely want to know about.”

The Pitti pieces, all of which were made using new factories whose doors were opened by Pitti’s power and sponsorship, won’t necessarily be produced for sale. Mr. Tait hopes that he’ll be able to take the lessons learned from their creation and apply them to his regular collections in the future. His presentation was less a showroom than a laboratory, which goes some way to explaining the white-canvas jumpsuit he’d selected for himself for the occasion. It looked like an astronaut’s suit but turned out to be a racecar mechanic’s, with a telltale Goodwood badge (from the British motor sport venue) on one arm.

The fact that Fantastic Man has a worldwide circulation of only 85,000 and a self-selective readership of worldly men who pride themselves as culture connoisseurs only reinforces its outsize influence.

“Some of them are pretty, and some of them are so weird,” a young girl at the St. Regis, who with her sister had hopped up to get iPhone photos, reported back to her parents at their table. “Some of their skin is so pale!”

Stefano Tonchi, the editor of W Magazine, called it “very influential in redefining men’s identity in the last decade.”

“If Fantastic Man would throw itself off a cliff, would webshop Mr Porter follow?,” read a quip from Fantastic Man’s spring/summer 2013 issue. (A representative from Mr Porter declined to comment for this article.)

Why? “I love serial TV,” Mr. Giorgetti crowed. “ ‘Game of Thrones,’ ‘Mad Men,’ ‘Transparent.’ I have a little problem in my life: I don’t go to the cinema anymore. I was a lover of cinema. I went to the cinema twice a week. Now, Sunday afternoon” — he mimed clicking on a computer keyboard — “streaming. It’s a drama.”

Instead, he used the Pitti opportunity in a wise and unusual way. He revisited past collections, reimagining or remaking pieces with new resources and improved production capabilities now at his disposal.

“It’s not the new Pucci,” she said. “It’s Pucci.”

•

It was an apt and sage assessment. The kid’s got a future if she wants it. But then, Pitti makes fashion critics of one and all.

Just don’t call Fantastic Man a lifestyle brand.

“From a distance, you could say Jop is visual and I am textual, but in reality it’s not that distinctive,” said Mr. Jonkers, the son of a preacher living in the Dutch countryside, whose dry, critical eye is reflected somewhat in his Continental prep manner of dress.

The magazine also spawned a sea of pink imitators (like Hello Mr. or Horst) that to this day could probably take up their very own section of “deadpan gay men with dad bodies” at Barnes & Noble. And who could forget the beach towel sets sold at American Apparel that featured life-size images of naked hirsute gay men, including a porn star or two?

But it wasn’t until 2001 with the start-up of Butt, an iPad-size zine dedicated to gay sex culture, that their subversive intelligence began to attract global notice. With its Pepto-Bismol-colored pages and playfully droll profiles of unconventional men like John Waters, the fashion designer Bernhard Willhelm and the occasional inked-up janitor who happened to be a gay exhibitionist, Butt became a must-read for indie-minded gay men who appreciated a slap on the rear end to normative notions of male sexuality.

The remodeling of men’s-wear clichés has been part of Fantastic Man’s mission from its start. The pair met in Amsterdam in 1997, when Mr. van Bennekom, a graphic design graduate, started a critically acclaimed title called Re-Magazine that would tackle a single topic in each issue, such as boredom or a Berlin woman named Claudia.

Taking a sip of beer, Mr. van Bennekom made it clear that he was antsy about letting the magazine become another fashion cliché. “I think there is a shift towards a cleaner, looser aesthetic right now in men’s wear,” he said, in explaining why Fantastic Man has undergone a subtle redesign.

Its timing could not have been better. The ascent of Fantastic Man dovetailed nicely with the emergence of the men’s wear industry as a cultural and economic force.