For the last several days, our fashion reporter Jacob Gallagher has been in Milan for the men’s fashion shows. Here, a recap of his reviews of the shows to know, which were previously published in The Fashions newsletter. If you haven’t subscribed, do so now to get Jacob’s takes early. He’s on to Paris as you’re reading this.
Thom Browne still hates soft shoulders
Talking about suits with Thom Browne can feel like speaking with the last man still communicating by telex.
The American designer, who ported his runway show over to Milan this season is, by my assessment, the last major men’s designer who clings, steadfast and stubborn, to a structured, fully canvassed suit.
“In the world of everything becoming a lot less structured, I do still really like the structured tailored pieces,” Browne said on Saturday during a preview of his latest collection. Some 20 years into his business, he is still standing, raging against the soft-shouldered tide. You have to hand it to the man.
“This is the reason you come to Thom Browne,” he said. “You come for tailored, structured sportswear.” He is, you could say, inclined to dance with the one that brought him. He rode the success of his shrunken, hefty suits in the early 2000s. This look is what he knows, what he personally tilts toward. He has been his own most committed model for more than two decades now.
The chatter at the show continued to be about whether or not it was a shrewd move or a deadly one for the Zegna Group to have taken a stake in Browne’s label in 2018. Browne didn’t acknowledge this head-on during the preview, but he did invite a comparison between the “very light and very unstructured” Zegna look and his own, as well as the more sexed-up image at Tom Ford, a more recent addition to the Zegna family tree.
“We’re three unique individuals, which I think does make the group very strong,” he said. (Browne was also stepping into a gap in the Milan men’s calendar created by Zegna, which moved its show to Los Angeles this month. It struck me that the group could swap in Browne for Zegna and not rankle the powers that be.)
Prada tightens up
If Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons were to be believed, their latest Prada collection was as basic, as unadorned, as a bowl of spaghetti al pomodoro.
“The only thing we said when we started talking was let’s change it, let’s make it completely different, let’s make it simple,” Prada said. The pair were feeling reactionary. Simons, accurately, brought up that no one on the street really wears runway clothes anymore.
Sometimes, he said, fashion “doesn’t feel new, fresh or young anymore.” We are in one of those times. They were seeking clarity, per Simons. They found it, Prada said, in “a show based on one item.”
That item? Jeans, which she hailed as “the most universal object.”
Wait, the whole collection is jeans?
Well, not exactly. “Slightly twisted, of course,” Simons said.
And twisted the collection was. Each model — and there were men and women walking the show — was in some variation of compressed five-pocket trousers, cropped to the ankle and about as wide there as a Negroni glass. Not a single pair was in conventional blue. They took shape in black leather, burgundy leather and Kermit green leather. Some were translucent. Many were white as pure cocaine.
Surrounding these “jeans,” the models wore other building blocks, like a cinched-to-the-navel leather jacket, sweater vests in trippy Deco prints, leather truckers with Mark Rothko-esque swatches on the back and softly slouched blazers. The show felt indebted to Helmut Lang, a master at taking what would be a familiar form on paper and doing something radical with it. (He also had a thing for white jeans and trucker jackets.)
Now, to acknowledge the obvious head-on: The silhouettes will polarize. (The photos may have alienated you already.) They’re tight. Tiny. Maybe too calibrated for this Ozempic moment. Prada has edged toward shrunken shapes for men in the recent past, especially in pants. This was a new extreme.
It seems like no coincidence that this arrived after a Prada men’s collection that was drowned out by an overcooked concept. Several of the celebrities in the front row, including Troye Sivan and Jordan Firstman, were in shirts from that collection with factory-set rust stains snaking all over them. That uneasy idea led to days of discourse on whether a luxury brand was mocking working-class aesthetics.
In contrast, I interpreted this latest collection as Simons and Prada nudging the fashion conversation forward on terms that at least related to the conventional traits of our clothes: fit, color, pattern, attitude. They reset the focus not on a convoluted conceptual back story, or a six-trillion-dollar snakeskin textile, or yet another new logo mark, but on the garments themselves.
“It’s a cleanser,” Simons said of the collection. I’d agree. And maybe not just for Prada, but for all of men’s wear.
Checking in to “The White Lotus” at Dolce
While I was ducking out of the heat and into a restaurant near the Duomo on Saturday, I slipped past a woman in a Dolce & Gabbana dress. It was short but not entirely skimpy and covered in one of the label’s very recognizable Majolica prints, recalling the chipped dishes of a Sicilian cupboard.
I was glad I came upon this Dolced marchesa.
Not two hours before, I was sitting at the Dolce & Gabbana show, spinning over the question that always pops and fizzles while navigating fashion week: So, whom is this for?
That’s not a qualitative judgment. It’s more a recognition that I’m so often required to look at something that I can’t quite latch onto, that seems to be presenting a lifestyle that I can never, may never, relate to.
OK, so I’m being a little glib. There were clothes that anyone could understand. Some tattered jeans and chalk-stripe suits with a heavy debt to the 1980s? Legible. Logical even, where the rest of men’s wear tastes sit right now.
But there were also plenty of shirts with torso-exposing eyelet cutouts, lace-up shoes in meshy macramé such that you could see the model’s toes and boat-neck tees in prints that felt plucked from cathedral walls. These were clothes for a vacation that this journalist, who has never set foot in coastal Italy, couldn’t quite envision.
Call me a basic American, but it made me think, mostly, of “The White Lotus.”
“For us, Sicily has never been a trend,” Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana said in a joint statement explaining the show. “It is the place where everything began and to which we have naturally returned for almost 40 years.”
One could feel, in this statement, some defensiveness against trend-hopping. It’s not just “The White Lotus.” Dua Lipa was just married in Sicily. It’s where Jeff Bezos and Lauren Sánchez honeymooned. Brunello Cucinelli staged a runway show there weeks ago.
But Dolce hails from the region. If any label has a claim to Sicily, it’s Dolce & Gabbana. But the pair is also being shrewd here, by giving a starter-kit wardrobe fit for the 1 percenters who vacation along the coast. It may not be for me, but I imagine it would please the husband of the woman I ran into at that restaurant. As ever, there are so many different worlds of taste — and wealth — out there.
Ralph Lauren made me feel old
It has been 13 years since Ralph Lauren euthanized its preppy sublabel Rugby, which I guess puts Rugby right on schedule for a reappraisal. And so it was that the critter pants-wearing ghosts of Rugby were seen romping around in the latest Polo collection, which bowed in Milan on Friday evening.
There were trousers embroidered with petite pennants, factory-frayed oxford shirts, rowing blazers in regatta stripes and a cardigan with “Rugby” stitched along the back, just to make it literal. It was so conspicuously cutesy in its use of letterman logo marks and cartoony skulls that it looked like an Archie comic strip’s depiction of American style.
It made me feel … well, old. Old in the sense that I was watching trends I’d already lived through boomerang back in front of me. But also old in the sense that this look is very much not for me anymore — at the ripe age of 34.
Ralph Lauren has been basking in a sort-of rebirth in recent years (an, ahem, Ralphaissance) ignited by a re-emphasized interest in a country clubby, East Coasty ideal of American fashion. The brand has attempted to ride this wave by staging consecutive fall and spring men’s fashion shows in Milan.
This Rugby-ified section of the show, though, made me question whether the company’s priorities were off. Was it a too-content packaging of something that would prompt Instagram likes? Had it cranked up the prep-o-meter several notches too far and accidentally shot us back to 2015?
But there were also glimpses in this show of the good will that Ralph has earned after 50-odd years. The things I always remember from these collections are those that made me think, Well, only he could get away with that.
What were those? The dinner jacket reimagined with a standup Nehru collar or the pocket-jammed fisherman vest contorted into a kimono. How about the swimming-in-them trousers with a waist you fold over to create streams of pleats, made in collaboration with Kuon, a Japanese design house.
Most of all, I was taken by the mouthful of a pullover sweater that depicted a galloping horse, a steer’s head, a smidgen of Fair Isle, some madras and a cactus. That was a jolly scrambling of the Ralph archives rather than a regurgitation.
The post The Must-Know Trends and Stories from Milan Fashion Week appeared first on New York Times.
