It’s a strange, unsettled moment in fashion — specifically in Milan’s menswear scene, where the calendar has shrunk drastically over the past couple of seasons to just a handful of meaningful shows.
On the one hand, there is an antsy discomfort over the uncertainty surrounding US tariffs and economic challenges in China; on the other, a new war in the Middle East threatens to unsettle another key market — Zegna, usually a tent-pole show for Milan, presented its spring/summer 2026 collection a few weeks ago in Dubai, squarely aimed at an affluent and important tranche of its global clientele.
That wasn’t the only star brand to go Awol — Kering’s Gucci was missing for a second season, and Fendi decided to present its men’s collection at its women’s show in September. Giorgio Armani was also absent. That is, his Emporio and eponymous brand’s shows were present and correct but, for the first time in five decades, the man himself did not bow at either — a fact feverishly reported by Italian press.
The 90-year-old Armani is recovering after a stint in hospital and left the shows in the trusted hands of his lieutenant Leo Dell’Orco. You would never have noticed anything different, so embedded are these shows — and, evidently, Dell’Orco too — in the eternality of Armani. Yet there was something about the absentia of the city’s eminence grise — “eminence greige”? — that felt indicative of a wider dynamic shift.
That said, Milan Fashion Week had this time around been shaped by a whole bunch of Armani influences that paid fitting, if coincidental, tribute to his talent. Other designers echoed his trademark muted colour palette, deconstructed tailoring and the intentional creasing, crumpling and overall lived-in look that he helped redefine fashion with in the 1980s. It was there, in Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana’s collection, a Saturday afternoon pyjama party of creased and striped largely cotton looks with a finale of embellished nightwear-as-eveningwear.
That all keyed to D&G’s own 1990s menswear heritage. Supermodel Linda Evangelista once infamously stated she didn’t get out of bed for less than $10,000 — which is probably what Dolce’s bling PJs will set you back. But as the temperature outside soared into the mid-30s, and the finale of male models took to the streets as if sloping out to buy a pink of milk from the corner shop in their sleepwear, it looked highly attractive as a modern dressing option.
That was the general feel — clothes that were less overly designed, less precious, less pressed. Alessandro Sartori showed visitors around his Zegna showroom, pointing out self-lined double layers of artfully crushed ticking-stripe silk poplin. “It’s as if you don’t care,” he said. “I didn’t want a ‘new’ feeling.” Indeed, his clothes looked as though they’d already been broken down and softened around the body, in mixes of Shetland linen and tussore silk. They were gentle clothes.
Milan may have felt depleted without its full roster of power players, but it gave space to inspect the quiet return of designer Umit Benan, who proposed a tight capsule collection of tailoring and shirting in a tonal rainbow. It also allowed Vivienne Westwood to take over a café to show a typically oddball bunch of clothes inspired, in part, by the passeggiata of Italian matriarchs, meaning that men wore stubby high heels and leopard coats and draped dresses.
The brand is now led by the late Vivienne Westwood’s husband, Andreas Kronthaler, who puts his money where his mouth is and has been wearing kilts for about 30 years, and latterly dresses.
“I don’t think there’s a strict separation,” he said in post-show remarks about gender. “In the men’s there’s always women’s. And Vivienne, she was very masculine.” That said, both Westwood and husband always had a strong hand with tailoring, and this show had some fine examples in softly coloured wools and wide, dandyish stripes. Even in Italy, they had an English eccentricity.
The same is true of Paul Smith, whose company is older even than Armani’s yet who has never shown in Milan before, despite manufacturing his garments in Italy for years. Smith usually presents in Paris, where his nutty, colourful creativity can get easily overshadowed in a crowded schedule.
Here, Smith’s focus on classic suiting with jolting fillips of detail or colour synced with Italy’s tailoring heritage, even though the collection was inspired by a jaunt from India, to Morocco, to Egypt — resulting in yet more of the season’s light tailoring and few subtle nods to those locales, mostly through hot colour. There was even a gentle nod to Armani-ish style at the end, in a slouch-shouldered grey suit worn over a wool-pinstripe shirt jacket with that Italian’s signature ease.
Ease was a word that Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons used about their collection too. They opened up their show venue to the sun, and laid down carpets shaped like scribbled flowers to show clothes mixed together with a remarkable freedom. Losing meaning was an intention — so a patched-pocket UPS brown shirt might migrate to become high-rise nappy-short hot pants, like a 1950s bathing suit. Those were shown alongside elongated variations on uniform smocks, and safari shirts and tracksuits mixed up with formal tailoring.
Just as limbs were freed in those shorts, the mind could follow. A big idea was rinsing various uniforms (of sport, of the beach, of industry) of their cultural weight and meaning, allowing them to be innocently enjoyed. “Gentle” was another word the duo used, while Miuccia Prada declared the show was “the opposite of aggression, power, nastiness.’‘ An antidote, in other words, to the churn of news right now.
But it was also an antidote to over-designed, overwrought and overthought fashion, to what they termed “meaningless complication”. These Prada pieces were straightforward, pared-back and eminently wearable. When the world is overwhelmingly complex, Prada and Simons reason, the simple things — sunlight, nature, space, a great trenchcoat — seem even sweeter.
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