The Frankie Shop Takes Milan: Oversized Suiting Moves Into the Quadrilatero

Eleven years after a Lower East Side boutique, Gaëlle Drevet’s label opens its first Italian store at 26 Via San Pietro all’Orto during Milan Fashion Week.

Via San Pietro all’Orto is a short street that does a lot of work. It runs from Via Montenapoleone down to Corso Vittorio Emanuele II, connecting Milan’s most expensive shopping street to its busiest pedestrian one, and it sits inside the Quadrilatero della Moda. On Wednesday, September 23, 2026, in the middle of Milan Fashion Week, The Frankie Shopopened its first Italian store there, at number 26, in a recently refurbished building next door to Aspesi at number 24 and near Pomellato.

Signal. What happened: The Frankie Shop, the New York and Paris label known for oversized suiting, opened a flagship in Milan’s Quadrilatero della Moda, its first store in Italy. Exact object: a two-storey store of about 230 square metres (around 2,475 square feet) at Via San Pietro all’Orto 26, designed by architects Mattia Nunzio and Isabella De Baviera Galimberti Poletti, with a ground-floor gallery space for art and events and a dedicated Milan capsule. When and where: opened September 23, 2026, during Milan Fashion Week; a London flagship is planned for 2027, with pop-ups in Shanghai and Tokyo due at the end of October 2026. Source: FashionNetwork (Olivier Guyot’s report, Sept 23, 2026), WWD and Milano Finanza’s MFF interview with founder Gaëlle Drevet. Why it matters: a self-funded, independent label taking a Quadrilatero address among heritage Italian houses is a sign of how far The Frankie Shop has come from its origins as a Lower East Side concept store, and Milan completes the third of the four fashion capitals Drevet has said she wants to be in. Earlier: September 2026 coverage of the Acne Studios Meatpacking District store and Moncler’s Fifth Avenue flagship tracked how brands are using new stores as event spaces as much as shops.

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The Quadrilatero itself is traditionally drawn by four streets, Via Montenapoleone, Via della Spiga, Via Manzoni and Corso Venezia, but in practice the district spills beyond that square. Wikipedia’s account of the zone counts Via San Pietro all’Orto among the streets to the south and west of Montenapoleone that function as part of it, along with Corso Matteotti, Piazza Meda and Via Verri. It is a secondary street in name only: it carries steady foot traffic between the luxury core and the Duomo end of the city center.

The neighbors say a lot about the street. Aspesi is a Milanese house built on outerwear and understated casualwear, founded by Alberto Aspesi in 1969, and Pomellato is the Milan jeweller founded by Pino Rabolini in 1967 and now part of Kering. Both are homegrown names with decades of history in the city. The Frankie Shop arrives as a New York and Paris label with no Italian heritage, selling oversized tailoring at contemporary rather than luxury prices, which makes the address as much a statement of intent as a retail decision.

Drevet was open about how hard the address was to get. Speaking to Milano Finanza a few hours before the opening, she said the brand would be something of an outsider in the luxury Quadrilatero, where finding a space had been complicated, and that she had been thrilled when this one came up. She has lived in London, Paris and New York but never Milan, she told the paper, though she loves the city’s people, architecture and food and goes to the Salone del Mobile every year.

Recent refurbished building on Via San Pietro all’Orto, Milan, where The Frankie Shop now occupies number 26.

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The design team is Italian. Milano Finanza credits architects Mattia Nunzio and Isabella De Baviera Galimberti Poletti with the project, and the Italian outlet Whoopsee reported that the interior nods to Casa Malaparte, the red modernist house on the cliffs of Capri, and to the work of Gio Ponti, with pieces of Italian mid-century furniture placed throughout. Speaking to FashionNetwork, Drevet said the aim was to take in the Italian atmosphere without losing the brand’s simplicity, letting the product and the space speak without too much artifice, and staying recognizably Frankie while being inspired by the city.

Both references are loaded ones in Italian design. Casa Malaparte was designed by Adalberto Libera for the writer Curzio Malaparte and completed in the early 1940s, its red masonry and inverted-pyramid stair rising out of a rocky headland; it later became a film location for Jean-Luc Godard’s Le Mépris. Gio Ponti, the Milanese architect and designer behind the Pirelli Tower and the Superleggera chair, founded Domus magazine in 1928 and shaped much of what the world thinks of as Milanese modernism. Putting his work underfoot in the changing rooms is a small, specific nod to the city the store now sits in.

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The Frankie Shop did not start as a fashion label. Drevet, who is French-American and spent around 25 years living in New York, opened the first Frankie Shop at the end of 2014 as a concept store on the Lower East Side, stocking exclusive pieces, often from young designers, at accessible prices. She described that origin in a 2023 interview with Who’s Next’s Prêt-à-Porter outlet, adding that she already had a background in fashion and a previous boutique. The brand’s own store page lists that first address as 100 Stanton Street. Earlier in her career, Drevet worked as a journalist and TV producer.

The e-shop followed on Thanksgiving Day 2015, and it became the engine of the business. The Frankie Shop built a reputation online and on Instagram for oversized blazers and relaxed tailoring, and the house style became its calling card. Drevet opened her first Paris boutique in 2017, in the Marais, and later added a second space across rue Saint-Claude, splitting womenswear into its own boutique at number 7 while the original store took the lifestyle, men’s and unisex ranges. The menswear line launched in 2022.

In New York, the brand added a second flagship in SoHo alongside its original Lower East Side shop, according to Forbes’s 2024 profile. It also runs shop-in-shops at Galeries Lafayette and Le Bon Marché in Paris.

Department stores came early. Urbansider reported that about a year after the first Paris opening, the brand was invited to run a pop-up at Galeries Lafayette, a relationship that has since become a permanent shop-in-shop. The brand has also stepped outside clothing, including a 2023 ceramics collaboration with French artist Thomas Lelu, according to the company’s own LinkedIn profile.

Drevet likes to describe the label through contrasts. In her 2024 Forbes interview, she summed up The Frankie Shop as a set of paradoxes: cosmopolitan and universal, done and undone, Paris and New York, masculine and feminine. She also pushed back against chasing social media micro-trends, suggesting customers look at what they already own and treat personal style as the real trend.

Over the past decade, the business has moved from being a multibrand boutique to an increasingly self-designed collection. In a March 2026 interview with Milano Finanza, Drevet said the range used to be mostly jackets and a few trousers, and that knitwear had since become much stronger, with more attention paid to fabrics, a larger team and a more structured sourcing and production system. Pieces such as the Gaia coat and the Nikola trench coat have become permanent styles.

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Italy is already a strong market for the brand without a store. FashionNetwork reported that the country is The Frankie Shop’s third-largest online market in Europe, with steady growth recently boosted by a selection of Italian multibrand stockists. Drevet told Milano Finanza that Italy has always been a huge market for Frankie and that the brand already has a solid and growing following there.

The store is meant to complete that picture rather than replace it. According to FashionNetwork, the Milan flagship will carry a capsule made specifically for it and will sit alongside e-commerce and wholesale in what the company describes as an omnichannel setup.

Opening during Milan Fashion Week puts the store in front of the international buyers, editors and stylists who are already in the city for the shows, and Drevet’s own connection to Milan runs through design as much as fashion, via her annual trips to the Salone del Mobile. The store’s gallery floor and its Italian design references read as a way to speak to both audiences at once.

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The timing also fits a busy stretch for the brand’s physical presence in Europe. FashionNetwork listed recent department-store openings at Globus in Geneva and Le Bon Marché in Paris, followed by new installations at KaDeWe in Berlin and De Bijenkorf in Amsterdam, all arriving alongside the Milan opening.

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Milan is the third of the four major fashion capitals for The Frankie Shop, and the fourth is already on the calendar. Drevet told Milano Finanza that London would follow in spring 2027, and FashionNetwork reported that the brand is looking at Mayfair for that flagship, with further projects in the United States planned after it.

Asia comes first, in shorter bursts. FashionNetwork reported that at the end of October, the brand will open two pop-ups: one at Réel in Shanghai and one in Tokyo in collaboration with Seya Nakamura. Milano Finanza added that the Shanghai pop-up is expected to stay open for a couple of months, while the Japan pop-up is planned for a single week.

For now, the newest address in the brand’s small network of stores is on a Quadrilatero side street, a few doors from Aspesi, with a green staircase just inside the entrance and Gio Ponti carpet in the changing rooms.