A new injection of energy came to Milan Fashion Week Men’s this season thanks to something of a British invasion: Martine Rose, who is largely inspired by underground subcultures in her idiosyncratic menswear collections, made her debut week on Sunday afternoon (16 June 2024), while heritage house Dunhill also joined the Milan schedule, seeing Simon Holloway present a collection he described as ‘radically classic’. Elsewhere, London-based label JW Anderson continued to show its menswear collections in the city, this season creating a collection titled ’Real Sleep’ inspired by the slumber state of hypnotherapy.
Other talking points of the weekend included Sabato De Sarno’s sophomore menswear collection for Gucci, which this season shifted to Monday morning (17 June 2024) and took place at Triennale Milano, the design gallery first constructed in the 1930s (it continued De Sarno’s desire to foster a link with the arts, having shown his Cruise 2025 collection at London’s Tate Modern last month). Prada, meanwhile, took over the timeline with a typically transporting set created alongside OMA/AMO – this time, a ‘fairytale ravescape’ featuring a cabin on stilts that had been erected in the Fondazione Prada space – backdropping what was one of the season’s defining collections.
The schedule was rounded out by the titans of Milanese style: among them Dolce & Gabbana, Zegna, Fendi and Armani, while Massimo Giorgetti celebrated 15 years of his Milan-based label MSGM.
Here, Wallpaper* selects the highlights from Milan Fashion Week Men’s S/S 2025.
The best of Milan Fashion Week Men’s S/S 2025
Zegna
A field of linen had been recreated in an enormous sound-stage-like venue on Milan’s outskirts, close to the city’s Linate airport, for Zegna’s latest runway show. Artsistic director Alessandro Sartori said that he wanted it to feel like the blades of linen – here constructed from featherweight strips of metal – were invading the otherwise industrial space. This shifting between man and nature was the catalyst for the collection, said Sartori, which was at once precise and organic, seeing sharply defined tailoring meet natural earthy hues of terracotta, beige and warm yellow and languid silhouettes. Much of the collection was crafted from linen – ‘Us, in the Oasi of Linen’ was the collection’s title – making use of the house’s near-unrivalled production and innovation with the material, which is also far more sustainable that other natural fibres like cotton. ‘[Linen is] as malleable and sensual as the idea of summer dressing we are prompting,’ the designer said, noting that it ‘moulds to individual personalities… [for men] who play buoyantly with their own appearance.’ This included the Danish actor Mads Mikkelsen, something of a house muse for Sartori, who closed the show with an elegant runway turn.
Gucci
This season, Sabato de Sarno shifted Gucci’s menswear show to its final Monday, choosing the Triennale Milano, the city’s 1930s-built design gallery, as a new venue. The clean white lines and light-filled atrium of the Giovanni Muzio-designed space provided something of a fresh slate for De Sarno, whose sophomore menswear collection felt like his strongest vision for the Italian house yet. There was an optical clarity to the season’s looks, which had been inspired by surfing, here figured in graphic short-and-shirt sets, swim slippers and luminous wraparound sunglasses which sat around the neck on Gucci-adorned straps like chokers. The mood was youthful: super-abbreviated shorts (an ode, perhaps, to house ambassador Paul Mescal, who sat front row in his own pair of Gucci short shorts), sheer net polo shirts and the poppy colour palette all skewed younger than the winter season (befitting this mood, 400 students were in attendance for Milan’s fashion and design schools). As has become a signature of De Sarno, flourishes of embellishment were used to elevate everyday garments, like the extraordinary beaded polo shirts or dangling tassels of beads across shirts and jackets, which lent a feeling of material richness to an otherwise streamlined collection.
Giorgio Armani
Mr Armani presented his eponymous menswear collection this season without any accompanying notes, preferring to let the clothing speak for itself. It is something that the designer – who turns 90 next month – has done across his five-decade-long career as a figurehead of Italian design, preferring to eschew seasonal gimmicks and complex runway sets for a mood of considered design and quiet elegance. Watched on by a Hollywood front row (another thing Mr Armani is synonymous with) which included Russell Crowe and La La Land director Damien Chazelle, this was an exercise in Armani-isms: unstructured tailoring in louche, generous proportions, diaphanous shirts and waistcoats, and a simple palette of Armani greige and navy. A mood of travel also permeated the collection – another hallmark of the designer – here figured in hazy palm-tree-frond prints and straw or cotton sunhats. Joined for his bow by team members Leo Dell’Orco and Gianluca Dell’Orco, the designer known as ‘Il Maestro’ received a warm standing ovation from the Teatro Armani crowd.
JW Anderson
The slumbering between-state of hypnotherapy was the starting point for Jonathan Anderson’s latest collection, a free association of ideas that saw the Northern Irish designer at the peak of his creative powers, balancing the strange and seductive in polished style. Looks emerged at first in threes: three duvet-like quilted jackets, three oversized utility gilets, three blown-up knit cardigans. Their play on proportion continued throughout – other silhouettes were stretched or shortened, and an enormous tie was gleefully oversized – while protrusions of coloured satin, or a series of bulbous padded T-shirts, lent a sculptural feel. Elsewhere, surreal motifs emerged like repressed memories or dreams, whether Guinness-adorned sweaters (Anderson said he remembered its unexpected advertisements growing up in Northern Ireland) or knitted dresses adorned with images of houses, as if lifted from a children’s storybook (on one, a tiny three-dimensional bird sat on the shoulder). Part of the inspiration for the liberated, freewheeling mood was a recent trip to Barcelona’s Primavera Sound festival: ‘The experimentation with clothing among younger generations is incredible,’ said Anderson. ‘The eye has changed within menswear and within womenswear. People want something that is really challenging.’
Martine Rose
Prior to the Martine Rose show – which happened just after Prada, and just a few hundred yards away – people questioned just how the London-based designer might bring her idiosyncratic, underground-infused brand of menswear to Milan, in what would be her first showing on the city’s fashion week schedule. Would she succumb to the city‘s sartorial polish? Presented in a former industrial building, the floor scattered with Martine Rose flyers – like those you might have found for a 1990s rave – the answer was a resolute no. Models stomped and slithered around the space with prosthetic noses (purposely haphazard) and wearing matted wigs so long they almost dragged along the ground. Men wore pencil skirts and fishnet stockings, or tailored trousers cut to appear like chaps (the crotch part was leather, an inversion of the expected), while for women the padded protection of a motorcycle jacket became the bust of a dress. Martine Rose signatures recurred throughout – shrunken football shirts, warped tracksuits, zip-away denim – alongside the requisite nods to nightlife and its dress codes. ‘When you’re young, you think that when you grow up your tastes are going to mature with you,’ she told Wallpaper* prior to the show. ‘This is the sort of irony.’
Prada
This season, the Fondazione Prada’s Deposito space had been installed with a new dwelling – a small white hut, raised on stilts, and with a long walkway leading down to the curving white runway below. From its windows and door, left slightly ajar, pulsated the sound of Faithless’s Insomnia, while flashing lights suggested a party was happening within, just out of sight. Here in this ‘fairytale ravescape’, said co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, was a collection which mused on ‘freedom, youthful optimism and energy’, something the former reiterated backstage after the show. ‘Youth is the future… it is hope,’ she said ‘We wanted to do something that would express youthful optimism because the times are so bad.’
The pair did so in pieces which appeared to have ‘lived a live, that are alive in themselves’. Silhouettes were dynamic: purposely creased, warped, shrunken and exaggerated, ‘like clothes you already live with,’ said Simons. Sleeves were short, as if garments had been borrowed or swapped between people. Shirts were skewiff and twisted around the body – like after a long night – while narrow trousers sat low on the waist and pooled at the ankle. Other pieces were made to question the reality of what you were seeing, demanding a second look. Like trompe l'oeil Breton T-shirts, where the stripe was warped and distorted, or low-slung leather ‘belts’ which were actually set into trousers. Enormous visor sunglasses – their lenses decorated with photographs of raves, Roman statuary and American highways – and prints by the artist Bernard Buffet, the latter appearing ‘like a concert T-shirt’, added a surreal, disorientating edge.
The pair said that it came down to working with intuition, of following what they were drawn to without asking why. ‘Sometimes when you are older you start to overthink, and you limit yourself. When you are young, you just go,’ said Simons. ‘We wanted to create clothes that have lived a life, that are alive in themselves,’ the pair concluded. ‘There is a sense of spontaneity and optimism to these clothes - they reflect instinctive but deliberate choices, freedom.’
Dunhill
A serene Milanese garden, close to the city’s rarefied shopping street Via Monte Napoleone, provided the setting for Simon Holloway’s sophomore collection for British heritage brand Dunhill, here shifting to the Italian city after showing last season at London’s National Portrait Gallery. This was a continuation of that debut, seeing Holloway once again explore the tropes of British dress – particularly those over a summer season of sporting and society events – in pursuit of what he called ‘radical classicism’. As such, he ran a gamut of typically British looks, from the casual – a suede utility jacket worn with driving gloves, cable-knit sweaters and pleat-front jeans – to the sporty – rugby shirts and shorts, striped varsity socks – and the unapologetically grand, like the collection’s final look, a black morning suit worn with an ivory silk scarf and cane. ‘These are not basic clothes for going into the office,’ said Holloway. ‘These are clothes for enjoyment, for a life well-lived.’
Emporio Armani
Unbridled horses frolicking in the surf, purple fields of lavender: the projections on the wall of the Teatro Armani showspace set the scene for an Emporio collection titled ‘Freedom in Nature’ which saw Mr Armani supplant his man for the season from his usual urban sprawl and into the wilds. The mood was one of adventure and abandon: shirting was plunging and worn with voluminous pants and heavy boots – the latter a nod to equestrianism – while superfine tailoring recalled safari jackets and kimonos. A focus on the waist ran throughout, whether in the belted utility jackets or the loops of leather which narrowed the waist of the designer’s louche, lightweight tailored blazers. It ended with the scent of lavender as a stream of lederhosen-clad men promenaded the space with baskets full of the springtime-blooming flower. Here, nature might have been somewhat tamed, but it nonetheless made from a transporting closing milieu, with the models surrounding Mr Armani – this season joined by Leo Dell’Orco and Silvana Armani, who look after the house’s men’s and womenswear collections – for his usual ovation, this year all-the-more celebratory in anticipation of his 90th birthday next month.
Fendi
Fendi left behind its usual showspace in the house’s Via Solari HQ (renovations and an expansion are currently underway), transporting guests to a studio lot-like showspace on Milan’s outskirts. It lent the presentation a grander scale, a feeling mimicked by the enormous mirrored blocks which danced around the runway as if operated by remote control, reflecting both audience and models across their spinning surfaces. Silvia Venturini Fendi, who heads up the house’s menswear and accessories collections, said that this season she was inspired by a deep dive into the Fendi archive. The Roman house will turn 100 this year, and the designer created a celebratory crest comprising four of the house’s motifs, including the famed double-F emblem, which here adorned sweaters and shirts. It lent the collection a varsity feel – Venturini Fendi talked before the show about wanting Fendi to feel like a team, or club – where striped knit rugby sweaters and ties met plaid jackets, school blazers and a playful riff on the football shirt. This was a uniform for the Fendi clan – and its wide-reaching international fanbase – to sport with pride in its centenary year.
Dolce & Gabbana
‘Italian Beauty’ was the title of Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana’s latest menswear collection, which saw the duo make a subtle gear-shift from the sharp, reduced line of recent seasons towards something softer, inspired by effortless Italian summers and actors like the louche Marcello Mastroianni. Raffia, a distinct hallmark of Italian furnishings, was one such motif, used here to create airy summer jackets and oversized polo shirts, while ever-astute tailoring – here largely double-breasted and worn with pleated trousers which narrowed towards the hem – harked back to the 1950s. Elsewhere, the collection was enlivened with flourishes of embroidery and embellishment, like the sprays of delicate red flowers which aodrned crisp white trousers and jackets.
MSGM
It was 15 years ago that Italian designer Massimo Giorgetti founded MSGM, a landmark celebrated with his latest menswear show held in a former industrial garage on Milan’s outskirts on Saturday morning. The crisp, optical collection, which looked towards the sea for inspiration, was backdropped by explosions of primary-colour paint against a series of Perspex boxes which lined the runway. They were an ode, Giorgetti elaborated, to an early collection he drafted an artist to daub with paint after fearing it was too safe. It also referenced the broad strokes of colour and graphic motifs the designer has evoked over the last decade and a half, here conjured in a vivid array of pattern, from riffs on nautical stripes and colourful daisies to painterly prints of seaside scenes. Indeed, Giorgetti said it is in his cliffside home in Liguria, close to Portofino, where the ideas for the collection percolated. As for the mood, this was a Mediterranean summer at its most evocative: ‘the rocks, Mediterranean pines, agaves, the scent of salt and resin,’ he listed, transporting guests – in Giorgetti’s typically uplifting fashion – from a cloudy Milan to the Italian riviera.
Stay tuned for more from Milan Fashion Week Men’s S/S 2025.
