Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons called their latest menswear collection, shown yesterday afternoon at Milan Fashion Week, ‘an exercise in clarity’. The runway was made from clear Perspex; underneath, row upon row of strip lighting, as if models were striding along an enormous light box, like those used by photographers to spot imperfections in their negatives.

Prior to the show, the designers said that they were putting menswear’s fundamental garments under their own scrutiny: most notably, the denim jean, a piece of clothing so ubiquitous that it is still being worn despite Milan’s close-to-40-degree heat. Others were the T-shirt (also ubiquitous, including being worn by Mrs Prada herself, underneath a duster coat), the denim jacket, the blazer and the leather blouson. They called them ‘striking in their pragmatism… a framework for ceaseless possibility and reinterpretation.’

Prada S/S 2027 men’s: ‘It’s against useless design’

Such interrogations have been at the heart of the pair’s collaboration, which is now in its 13th season (Simons joined Mrs Prada as co-creative director in 2020). Largely eschewing the stricter themes which once defined a Prada collection, they prefer to work through intuition. ‘We worked instinctively, we know what we don’t want to do, and we know that we have to refresh, go forward, do many things,’ they said in a joint statement. ‘But with a lot of knowledge of fashion. Everything looks simple, but it is not.’

The show was opened by Australian model and longtime Prada muse Julia Nobis (a handful of women walked the show this season, a reflection of the unisex nature of the collection), who wore a matching cream pair of jeans and a denim jacket, with a navy blazer on top. Prior to the show, Simons likened this mix of sartorial ingredients to a ‘pasta pomodoro’ – a dish of ultimate simplicity (he wore a version for his runway bow).

From there, the look was reworked: ‘jeans’ came in brightly hued leather, wool, or a sheer material that revealed the garment’s construction beneath, blazers in Prince of Wales check or pinstripe. The look was skinny throughout – the designers described it as a ‘highly controlled silhouette’ – while accessories largely centred around the waist, from super-wide belts that were hung with nylon and leather pouches, to patterned foulard-style silk scarves, tied around the midriff.

‘The ambition was to do something new with nothing – against exaggeration, against complex material. Against useless design,’ the pair said. ‘There is nothing that [we] hate more in this period than useless design – this collection expresses this concept. And this nothingness is very precise – to do this is far more difficult to achieve.’

Follow our live coverage of Milan Fashion Week Men’s here.

At Wallpaper*, we champion the design-led, forward-thinking and impeccably executed. We’re always on the lookout for compelling creations – from objects and accessories to jewellery, fashion and tech – and aim to bring you pieces that subvert, surprise and delight.

In The Design Drop, we highlight the most striking objects to land in a given month. Think of it as a wish list for the design-discerning: browse, admire – and, if tempted, acquire.

Read on to discover May's standout pieces from our favourite brands and studios.

In the 20 years since Mary Kate and Ashley Olsen founded The Row in 2006, the pair have proved increasingly adept at reimagining the quotidian in ultra-luxurious style. This is particularly true when it comes to their sought-after footwear, with everything from the humble jelly shoe – reminiscent of those sold in seaside towns to traverse rocky beaches and coves – to spa slippers and hiking sandals getting The Row upgrade (and thus making them ubiquitous within style circles, which have long looked towards the Olsens as fashion soothsayers).

The same is true of this riff on the flip-flop sandal, a style that the pair have presented in various iterations in recent seasons. Evoking the hardy beach sandals of the 1990s, this latest version is reworked in the pair’s considered, pared-back style, complete with a grosgrain strap, leather toe divider and a soft leather footbed – robust enough to prove their utility all summer long, whether padding along hot city streets or wandering beachside.

Indeed, the thong flip-flop – a once-derided summertime accessory – will continue to prove ubiquitous in 2026’s warmer months, favoured for its clean, minimal line and synonymy with the 1990s and early 2000s, an era which, in fashion at least, proves ever-present.

Alongside The Row, the flip-flop appeared across the S/S 2026 collections: at Pierpaolo Piccioli’s debut for Balenciaga, flocked thong flip-flops came with a padded sole and jewel adornment (the illusion was that of a 1990s toe ring); at Prada men’s, they were a hyper-colourful riff on the rubber-and-foam beach flip-flop (think: Prada’s take on the Havaiana, rendered in leather); while at Auralee, they came with equally brightly hued soles, a testament to designer Ryota Iwai’s reputation as a master colourist.

A version of this article appears in the June 2026 Travel Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

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Prada’s S/S 2026 show was about a collision of elements, oscillating between the working uniform – a perennial reference for designers Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons – and eveningwear, the latter conjured in colourful protrusions of satin, sequin surface embellishment, and colourful opera gloves. The co-creative directors called it a ‘new elegance’, where clothing was liberated from its traditional hierarchies. ‘There is the license to combine different elements, to compose,’ said Simons post-show, noting that it was the pair’s freest collection yet.

This juxtaposition might have been best captured in one of the collection’s handbags: the humble dustbag, usually used to store accessories to protect them while in storage or in transit, here reimagined in colourful satin and leather (rather than its usual cotton canvas). It made for a contemporary riff on the evening bag, at once functional, elegant, and a little playful – not unlike Miuccia Prada’s embrace of nylon in the 1980s, where with her 1984 ‘Vela’ backpack, she convinced that the manmade fabric could be just as luxurious as leather.

And now, the drawstring pouch has a strong case for being the accessory of the summer – simple in construction, but surprisingly practical in carrying the necessities (iPhone, credit cards, a little make-up). This is particularly true of warm days and evenings, when you no longer want to be weighed down by heavy handbags or sweaty straps – with the pouch, you simply pick up and go (in the Prada show, models grasped them in the hand, but you could equally use the drawstring cords to sling it over the wrist).

Here, we select eight of the best drawstring pouches, from Prada’s ‘Wish’ bag (here in satin and suede iterations) to Celine’s rainbow-hued leather offerings, or – for the more adventurous – a Loewe cotton pouch adorned with Louis Wain’s eccentric illustrations of cats.

As seen in the June 2026 Travel Issue of Wallpaper* – a series of ‘horizon-expanding adventures and voyages of discovery’ – here’s how to stand out this summer with our pick of the season’s most eye-catching accessories, from the fantastical (Prada opera gloves; Givenchy feathered mules) to the functional (Mulberry denim sun hat; Celine oversized sunglasses). Each is primed to make a sartorial statement over the warmer months – a time for dressing with joy and abandon.

Prada opera gloves (above left)

A glove might not immediately call to mind the summer months, though the elongated opera glove was ubiquitous on the S/S 2026 runways, including this pink satin pair at Prada, where Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons mixed up the working uniform with flourishes of eveningwear (often in a single look). ‘There is the license to combine different elements, to compose,’ said the latter post-show.

Loewe’s ‘Amazona 180’ bag (above right)

A reinterpretation of the archival Amazona bag has become the hallmark accessory of Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez’s tenure at Loewe so far (they debuted for the S/S 2026 season). The ‘Amazona 180’ – referring to the 180th anniversary of the Spanish house this year – reimagines the boxy shape of the original with a slouchy new structure, designed to hang open when worn. Our favourite? This mini version in bold azure blue.

Celine sunglasses

Celine’s Michael Rider, who formerly worked at the house under Phoebe Philo before heading up Polo Ralph Lauren, marries his American roots – he was born in Washington D.C. and attended Brown University – with the house’s Parisian sensibility. Like these gleefully oversized sunglasses, which are a nod towards the bourgeois-inflected uniform of house founder Céline Vipiana in her 1970s heyday.

Givenchy’s ‘Boudoir’ mules

The summer months are primed for dressing with abandon – particularly this S/S 2026 season, where designers channelled a mood of colour, optimism and joy. These slip-on Givenchy ‘Boudoir Fringe’ mules – designed by creative director Sarah Burton – epitomise this liberated attitude, adorned with fronds of feathers.

Chanel’s resin necklace

Thanks to the stewardship of Belgian designer Matthieu Blazy, Chanel has fast become this year’s most sought-after brand – the arrival of his S/S 2026 collection in stores earlier this year sparked a much-documented shopping frenzy. This necklace, with an enormous resin charm recalling a black oyster shell, is a way to pledge your allegiance.

Fendi’s ‘Lui’ bag

Fendi has long been known for its colourful accessories which marry Made in Italy leathercraft with a sense of humour and play. Case in point: the Lui bag, a slouchy shoulder bag designed to slot neatly onto the body when worn cross-body. This version is finished with supersized leather topstitching.

Dior’s ‘Lady Dior by Sheila Hicks’ bag

At both his eponymous label, JW Anderson, and Loewe, where he was creative director for a decade, northern Irish designer Jonathan Anderson has fostered a close relationship with the art world, often through collaboration. This continues with his new role as creative director of Dior, where his S/S 2026 collection featured this Lady Dior tasseled bag, a collaboration with American artist Sheila Hicks.

Limited-edition Hermès lipsticks

A trio of limited-edition Rouge Hermès lipsticks will add a flash of colour to your make-up bag, and not only in their rich pink and mauve shades. Because the real joy of these lipsticks is the Pierre Hardy-designed packaging, adorned with graphic motifs in eye-catching primary hues.

Bottega Veneta’s ‘Baby Veneta’ bag

Bottega Veneta’s intrecciato technique – which sees strands of leather woven together – is the house’s hallmark, eschewing the need for more overt logos and branding. The new ‘Baby Veneta’, a mini hobo bag, is crafted from padded intrecciato leather, here in vivid ‘Cardinal’ red.

Mulberry denim hat

A sun hat is a perennial summertime essential. This one, from British house Mulberry, combines function with flair: crafted from classic blue denim, it comes with a bright-yellow cord-fastening, like those you might find on hiking attire.

Louis Vuitton’s summer scents

This duo of Jacques Cavallier Belletrud-masterminded Louis Vuitton fragrances capture the scent of summer: the first, On The Beach, has citrus fruit yuzu at its centre, married with fresh neroli and woody cyprus (the idea was to capture the ‘ecstasy of sun and the warmth of sand’). The second, Sun Song, is a radiant mix of orange blossom, neroli and petitgrain, finished with a final touch of lemon.

Loro Piana’s ‘Just Bag’

Sometimes the summer months require simplicity: in the heat of the day, the last thing you want is complicated. Loro Piana’s effortless ‘Just’ bag is inspired by the simple proportions of a classic paper bag, though here rendered in the Italian house’s soft and lightweight ‘Silk Calf’ leather.

Fashion/set assistant: Alice Heluin-Afchain

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At Prada’s S/S 2026 menswear show, co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons revealed the usually hidden windows of Fondazione Prada’s Deposito, where the house has held its runway shows since 2018. Flooding the space with natural light for the first time, the OMA-designed set – which featured a series of 1970s-inspired floral rugs across the hangar-like space’s concrete floor – was a reflection of the collection’s escapist mood. ‘This is the first time the Fondazione is completely bare, with the light coming in,’ said Simons backstage. ‘We want everything to be light, fresh and colourful. When we started working, it was the easiest collection I have ever done. It's very free.’

The best colourful outerwear to brighten spring days

Alongside vivid raffia hats, boldly adorned floral tabards and a series of bloomer-cum-cargo pant micro-shorts, were colourful mackintosh jackets – including one in vivid, pillarbox red that featured in the Wallpaper* March Style Issue as part of a digest of S/S 2026’s trends. ‘Outerwear eschewed the usual hues of grey, brown and black for bold colours that befit spring,’ we said of the season’s liberated mood, with such colourful overcoats making appearances at Auralee, Loewe, Dries Van Noten, Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello and Polo Ralph Lauren (the last captured another, but intertwining trend, that of preppiness – one also defined by a bold use of colour).

Spanning both mens and womenswear, these colourful jackets, overcoats, windbreakers, anoraks and macs make the perfect transitional outerwear – their unrestrained palette the perfect match for spring’s brighter (but oftentimes cool, and sometimes unpredictable) days. After all, on the crest of summer, it is a time to embrace hope and renewal in both life and wardrobe. Our picks of spring’s best colourful outerwear – each light enough for warmer days – are a good place to start.

At the new Prada Home space on Via Montenapoleone, Theaster Gates presents Chawan Cabinet, an installation organised around ceramic vessels and the behaviours they produce. During Milan Design Week 2026, the project brought together editioned works by Gates alongside Japanese potters Taira Kuroki, Yuichi Hirano, Shion Tabata and Koichi Ohara, with larger sculptural elements from Gates’ Chicago studio and tea master Yukino Washizu.

Gates, who works across sculpture, urban planning and pedagogy is clear about where this began. 'Part of what I wanted to do with the project is demonstrate how when you have a specific ideological position, you can then make a very precise declaration,' he says. 'It’s not exactly Japanese, but it is with my friends, who are Japanese. It’s not exactly the Blackest thing in the world, but it has funk on it. [I am] just trying to have a sincere moment where my passion for everyday things meets this company that is willing to make an investment in a big idea.'

The clay is gathered and worked across the American Midwest: Wisconsin, Indiana, North Carolina, then fired in a Japanese-style kiln built in Chicago. The resemblance to Tokoname is deliberate, achieved through a transfer of technique, not a fixation on origin. Gates describes this in terms that move well outside the studio, tracing a line through religious and intellectual histories where knowledge is carried and translated, accumulating as it moves.

It is tempting to treat that transfer as metaphor, though he resists it. 'The hand is the mind,' he says. 'People have worked really hard to separate physical labour from intellectual labour, but if you can put aside capitalism, you really unite the mind and the hand again. I know more because I’ve touched more.' The statement lands plainly in a room where the objects are not sealed off from contact, but welcome it instead.

The forms are specific and named: chawan, yunomi, guinomi, tokkuri, each carrying their own discipline. A chawan should be turned twice, clockwise, before it is brought to the mouth to preserve and respect the front of the object. The cabinet sits between the category of furniture and something closer to staging; around it, Gates introduces larger elements from his studio, forms that carry more weight than the vessels, which thicken the space.

Italian craftsmanship is present throughout without resolving into polish; Venetian plaster has been reworked with straw and a rougher aggregate, the finish feels as though it has been padded by many feet, even though it has only just been applied.

Behind the bowls, Gates points to a stack of Pelican cases – one in safety orange, another in military green – their moulded shells and pressure valves in direct contrast to a chawan, turned slowly, fired in a kiln tuned by hand. 'It makes total sense that my tea bowls will be in a pelican case. I’m merging a transfer of knowledge.'

Gates moves easily between the scale of a cup and that of a building, though he does not pretend they ask the same of him. 'Ideas trump scale,' he says. 'If you have a philosophy that’s clear enough, that aesthetic intention can be applied to the composition of things on this table, composition of this room, composition of this block.'

There is also the question of duration; the installation was timed to the week, yet its end is not fixed. In a wabi-sabi sense, Gates speaks of it without certainty, which feels consistent with the project’s underlying logic. A home, as he frames it, is not guaranteed by walls or ownership; you don’t know how long it will hold, or what brings it to a close.

'I had the problem of contemporary art versus retail store, craft versus conceptual practices, and I’ve tried my best through the cabinet to unify utility and beauty,' Gates says. At Prada Home, a chawan, turned and returned, sets the pace; in that waiting, something like a position on how knowledge is carried through the body becomes clear.

The new Prada Home space is now open on Via Montenapoleone 6, Milan

Springtime, at least in the United Kingdom, is a season of unpredictability – for every bright, blue-skied day, when the restorative heat of summer feels tantalisingly close, is one of gloomy grey and drizzle. And sometimes, the weather can ricochet between the two in a single day, making getting dressed in the morning a Groundhog Day-like conundrum.

The answer, of course, is layers – spring is a time for the clever addition and removal of sweaters, vests and long-sleeve T-shirts throughout the course of a given day (take advice from Prada’s S/S 2026 runway show, where models walked the runway four times each, discarding layers as they went). Though it is perhaps the outermost layer which is your most important decision: the weighty and enveloping wool coats of winter can begin to feel constraining, while it's not quite warm enough yet to go sweater-only.

Step in the windbreaker, a surprisingly hardy – but usually lightweight – piece of outerwear which, as its name suggests, provides a barrier against the elements (they are often waterproof, too). And gone are the suggestions of the anorak or windbreaker being dowdy or dour: Saint Laurent featured bold-shouldered shell jackets as part of its S/S 2026 Fire Island-inspired menswear show, while iterations have appeared at Miu Miu, Loewe, The Row and Prada. Meanwhile the windbreaker’s typical funnel-neck construction has become a recurring outerwear trend in 2026, much down to Phoebe Philo’s embrace of the silhouette.

Here, as selected by the Wallpaper* team, eight of the best windbreakers and anoraks for men and women – from perfect Prada pink to Scandinavian simplicity from Arket.

Prada and Formafantasma announce the fifth edition of their collaborative symposium. Prada Frames will take place from 19 to 21 April 2026 during Milan Design Week, and this year's theme is 'In Sight'.

What is Prada Frames?

Prada Frames made its debut in 2022: a series of lectures and conversations led by Formafantasma, the symposium has since become a key moment of Milan Design Week (in 2023, the initiative also had a two-day event at Hong Kong's M+).

‘Education and culture are essential instruments that help us not only comprehend ourselves and the world we live in, but also urge us to explore the unknown,’ said Miuccia Prada on the occasion of the project's launch in 2022. ‘Conversations have always been at the core of Prada’s approach and investigation of the world, so Prada Frames with Formafantasma was a very natural step in this direction.’

This has proved to be a successful approach, with the three-day symposium returning year after year and exploring themes such as 'On Forest', 'Materials in Flux’, 'Being Home' and 'In Transit' - both reflecting Formafantasma's own research focus and the key topics resonating across the creative industries (and beyond, with speakers ranging from the fields of film, philosophy and science).

Prada Frames 2026: 'In Sight'

The 2026 theme of 'In Sight' focuses on image-making. 'Images, today, embed a net of entanglements, challenges and contradictions,' read a note introducing the upcoming edition. 'No longer a reliable depiction of truth, they embody a tension between the real and the represented, with distinctions between human-authored and machine-generated increasingly blurred. As a result, reference points crumble, complicating the ability to discern reliable information from fabrication.'

In typical Formafantama modus operandi, the infrastructure of image-making will also be addressed, from a point of view of extraction of resources, energy consumption, data storage, and invisible forms of labour.

As in previous years, the symposium's location will also play a key role in shaping the audience's experience. In the past, Prada and Formafantasma have taken over key historical Milanese venues such as the National Braidense Library, Luigi Caccia Dominioni's Teatro Filodrammatici and Gio Ponti's Arlecchino Train. The 2026 edition will be staged within the sacrestia of Santa Maria delle Grazie church, notably the home of Leonardo's 'Last Supper'.

Guests will experience the Renaissance space (attributed to architect Donato Bramante), defined by cabinets inlaid with biblical scenes by Domenico and Francesco Morone. Small groups will be allowed to join guided visits of the building, expanding the context of the symposium into an architectural experience.

'Prada Frames is a space where different forms of knowledge meet,' say Formafantasma founders, Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin. 'The challenges we face today are complex and interconnected, and they cannot be understood from a single point of view. Bringing together voices from different disciplines – whether science, the humanities, activism, or the arts – creates a richer conversation and allows us to look at the present from multiple perspectives.

'For us, this exchange is essential to better understand the systems shaping our world and how we might navigate them.'

Admission to Prada Frames In Sight is complimentary, based on availability, upon registration at prada.com from April 13. Speakers will be announced closer to the date.

Prada Frames, 19-21 April 2026, Basilica di Santa Maria delle Grazie, Via Cardosso 1, Milan

From abstracted plays on domestic spaces at Prada and Marni, to sets celebrating icons of urban architecture at Burberry and Dior, the A/W 2026 season offered much in the way of innovative set design.

As always, these temporary constructions can tell us as much about a designer’s current preoccupations as the garments they send out into them. For Loewe’s Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez it was an invocation of play, at Prada Raf Simons and Miuccia Prada are thinking about what is revealed when the surface layer is stripped away, and for Demna, it was investigating the ‘Gucciness of Gucci’ – a quest which, ahead of his first outing for the brand, led him back to Florence, the city in which it all started. Discover some of the stand-outs from fashion month below.

The standout show sets of fashion month A/W 2026

Burberry

Midway through February, it was reported that it had rained every day of 2026 in the UK – a news story that Daniel Lee might have had in mind whilst conceptualising the set for Burberry’s A/W 2026 collection. Trompe l’oeil puddles of resin scattered the tarmac-effect runway at Old Billingsgate Market, which was transformed into a night-time vignette of Tower Bridge, replete with that most familiar urban sight: scaffolding.

If a former 19th-century fish market seems an unlikely venue for London’s most high-profile luxury brand to show a collection, consider that gabardine, the fabric created by Thomas Burberry in the 1870s, is to this day a mainstay of angling attire – indeed, a quote singing the praises of Burberry from the Fishing Gazette was used in early advertising for the brand. The infusion of that practical, outdoorsy heritage with contemporary cosmopolitan glamour translated into a collection of opulently finished outerwear – from signature trench coats reimagined in silk or with ruffled lapels, to rich swathes of shearling.

READ: A first look at Burberry’s A/W 2026 show set, which depicts London landmarks ‘under construction’

Diesel

Diesel’s A/W 2026 runway set consisted of around 50,000 pieces of memorabilia from the brand’s archive, a monumental time capsule dedicated to almost 50 years of partying. Displayed under bleached lighting, the installation was awash with high-voltage colour, with objects ranging from a fringed parasol and inflatable beach doughnut, to a coffee machine, motorbike, and lava lamp. Creative director Glenn Martens described the season’s mood as ‘waking up in a place, with no idea what happened last night’: think crinkled denim and ripped hems. Judging by the contents of the eclectic clutter, the place could be anywhere from a roadside motel, MTV Beach House, or a teenager’s bedroom. Pick your poison.

Marni

If ‘familiar’ is a recurrent, self-confessed description of Meryl Rogge’s aesthetic tastes, it’s certainly not meant as a synonym for ‘samey’. There is always a little surprise, a fun tweak, or a new addition that keeps things fresh and exciting. For Rogge’s debut collection for Marni, this took the form of palm-size sequins, pointed mules with laces on the toes, and pants with two sets of stacked belt loops. And in the set design – a collaboration with Wallpaper*’s Designers of the Year 2021 Formafantasma – it meant something that looked ‘as if a room has been carefully disassembled and reassembled in another order,’ as Formafantasma’s Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin told us before the show.

The bones of the space were augmented with wood-effect panelling and fabric-covered benches, and a giant door mat in lieu of carpet. Mirrored panels, which were hand-painted with ‘fragments drawn from quotidian life’ like car headlights and office chairs, played with perception. Are they images? Or are they portals?

‘The decision to carefully hand-paint these ordinary details was important,’ say Trimarchi and Farresin. ‘Spending time rendering something banal gives it attention without turning it into spectacle. In a moment when most images are produced and consumed quickly, the act of painting introduces care and slowness. It allows us and hopefully others to look again at things we normally overlook, to pause for a second longer than usual.’ It’s a message that carries through to Rogge’s attitude toward design: robust, realistic and resonant.

READ: Formafantasma created the ‘familiar yet unsettled’ show set for Meryll Rogge’s Marni debut

Gucci

A few hundred metres from the Palazzo Gucci in the Tuscan city of Florence sits one of Europe’s most prominent art museums – the Uffizi, in an architectural complex begun by Giorgio Vasari in the year 1560. It is home to such illustrious works from the Western canon as Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus, da Vinci’s The Annunciation, and Caravaggio’s Medusa. It was also the starting point for Demna, the Georgian designer who took the helm of the 105-year-old brand in 2025, when the shape of the A/W 2026 show space began to form in his imagination.

‘When I left the museum and stepped into Piazza della Signoria, the first thing I saw was Palazzo Gucci,’ the designer wrote in a letter published online the day before the show. ‘In that moment, I understood the place Gucci holds within Italian culture.’

His recreation of something resembling the storied museum, in Milan's Palazzo delle Scintille, was executed with typical Demna-like innovation: all hard edges and ultra-modern materials. The slick geometric hall was clad in travertine Stoneleaf, made from ultra-fine sheets of Italian marble bonded onto sheets of fibreglass and transparent resin. Classical sculptures were made out of plaster using 3D scanning, and then treated to look like aged marble. The runway itself was marked out by a skinny beam of fluorescent light, through which models sauntered and languished at a museum-appropriate pace.

READ: Demna’s first runway set for Gucci is an imagined museum filled with sculptural greats

Prada

If Prada’s A/W 2026 show was, as Wallpaper’s Jack Moss described, ‘an exercise in extreme layering’, the Deposito of the Fondazione Prada, where 15 models showed a total of 60 looks, was in many ways its antithesis – or perhaps its logical conclusion. The collection itself was cleverly conceived to reveal itself through the gradual stripping away of garments, so that by the time each model had taken her fourth turn about the room, coats and scarves had given way to light cotton pinafores and bloomers. However, the set had been stripped already, leaving only an eerie whisper of what might have been there before, like when you see a partially demolished house. Fireplaces exposed to the elements. Masonry jaggedly revealed. Interior made exterior.

In a continuation of the sliced-open palazzo created by OMA for the menswear offering in January, artefacts which spanned five hundred years – from 16th-century tapestries to modernist lampshades – were effectively suspended around the perimeter of the room, each level an echo of a floor without a floor. Walls were delicate pastel shades with intact wainscotting juxtaposed against the imprint of former joists, or the patinated shadow of where a dividing wall once stood.

‘Their meaning is layered [and] inherently personal,’ explains Prada of the mish-mash of objects within the space: a Venetian mirror, various consoles, paintings from different periods and more. The house’s co-creative directors and their respective tastes and preoccupations are keenly visible in this selection, but they also leave room for imagination. By revealing so little, we are left to fantasise for ourselves about who the inhabitants of this dilapidated, but once grand, former dwelling might have been.

Dior

What more appropriate way to kick off Paris Fashion Week than a promenade in the Jardin des Tuileries? And for Dior, no less. The 1st arrondissement park has been open to the public since the late 17th century and has been a fixture of Parisian life ever since, not to mention a favourite subject of Impressionist scenes and a backdrop for revolution. This March, it became the site of Jonathan Anderson’s second womenswear collection for Dior, in a show space described as ‘an imitation of a park, within a park’.

Designed around Le Bassin Octogonal was a structure which drew from the familiar grass-green garden furniture that is scattered throughout the park, with a runway which snaked 360-degrees round the perimeter of the water, and across its centre (water which was filled with imitation water-lillies, an unmistakably Andersonian touch, and a nod to the eight murals by Monet which are housed at Musée de l’Orangerie in the western-most corner of the Tuileries).

In a conversation which aired before the show, Anderson told his friend, designer and podcaster Bella Freud that he ‘will always feel like a tourist in Paris’ and yet the city itself seemed to look upon him as a treasured friend this A/W 2026: the early-spring sun shone brightly, and the water reflected dappled light throughout the scene.

READ: Jonathan Anderson’s latest Dior show was a walk in the park

Saint Laurent

Now in his tenth year at Saint Laurent, for A/W 2026 Anthony Vaccarello chose to focus ‘on the house at its most foundational’. For the collection, this meant mega-watt sex appeal, body contouring, and the glorious revival of Le Smoking. And for the setting – it could only mean Paris, and that perpetual, romantic emblem of the French capital, Le Tour Eiffel. Gustave Eiffel’s iconic landmark has been a mainstay visual for what is arguably the city’s most illustrious house since the days of the maison’s namesake. Vaccarello himself has regularly used it as a backdrop for his work with the brand – sometimes with the runway literally beneath its iron frame.

This season, the glittering structure was glimpsed through vast windows, part of a set designed to evoke the apartment once inhabited by Yves Saint Laurent himself, with his partner Pierre Bergé. That duplex, at 55 rue de Babylone, is now the stuff of legend, its contents scattered to the four winds after Yves’s death, but once upon a time it was home to a vast collection of artworks (from Burne-Jones to Mondrian), furniture, and books. Archival photographs of the space show the same wood panelling and thick-pile carpet that we saw at the show space, which also featured a replica of a bust owned by Saint Laurent and Bergé, blown up to oversize proportions.

Loewe

How better to dress the backdrop to a collection foregrounding ‘joy, experimentation and play,’ than with toys? The work of Cologne-based artist Cosima von Bonin was a key influence for Loewe’s Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez this season, finding its way into both the ready-to-wear and the mise-en-scene. Known for creating larger-than-life plushies and other animalistic sculptures, often fabricated in textiles or constructed from found objects, von Bonin’s mark was left in the show space by a host of black velveteen sea creatures who rubbed up against journalists on the high-gloss, oversize shoebox style seating. These critters and creatures (the soft toys, not the journalists) were dramatically shrunk down too, appearing as hard-shelled minaudièrs and dinky bag charms throughout the show. The room itself, at Château de Vincennes on the very fringes of the city, featured high-contrast, optimistic decor: stark white walls and vivid vinyl yellow floor which echoed the sheen of moulded latex and lacquered leather seen on the runway.

Chanel

‘Matthieu Blazy does it again’ was Wallpaper’s first reaction to Chanel’s A/W 2026 show. After last year’s electrifying debut, Blazy had set the bar at lofty heights for himself, heights he cleared with no trouble in this latest go-around. Drop waists, metallic hair, and some of the most coveted shoe of the 2020s were all part of the magic, but as we’ve already come to expect from Blazy’s tenure, so was the set design. Where his first two outings, for ready-to-wear and couture, saw an immersive take on the solar system, and then something rather more down-to-earth in the form of sugary pink mushrooms, respectively, A/W 2026 featured enormous cranes in Playmobil primary colours, piercing the space within the Grand Palais’ main atrium.

With their resemblance to stage rigging, these monumental installations were assembled on a glitter floor to evoke the joy of dance – reinforced through a soundtrack of Lady Gaga remixed with dialogue from Billy Elliot. The whole effect was a glorious reminder of what Blazy’s Chanel is to be: totally joyful.

READ: Matthieu Blazy’s sophomore Chanel collection is made for ‘women to be unapologetically who they are’

A review of the beauty looks from the A/W 2026 season, which finished in Paris earlier this week, contains a surprise: a lot of it was a mess. That’s not a put-down. Rather, the intriguing messiness of the season was deliberate, with even some of the most consistent purveyors of sleek, minimalist beauty, like Hermès and Alaïa, featuring hair that had a ‘I just got out of bed’ quality.

A similar look was seen on the Prada runway, with models in smudged raccoon-eye make-up and hair in half-done ponytails that had strands haphazardly escaping. The show had a novel concept: 15 models, wearing 15 looks, with each model changing four times throughout the show to create a new composition of the previous look. The beauty complemented the idea by suggesting a woman always in motion, always in a rush, too busy to refresh her make-up or even redo her ponytail over the course of the day.

The best beauty looks of A/W 2026

In New York, Collina Strada took messy hair to the next level with hairstylist Mustafa Yanaz giving models bed-heads that looked like they took many sleepless nights to achieve. While in London, the teased, matted hair at Simone Rocha was paired with punk details in, of all places, the eyebrows, such as multiple eyebrow rings and a black-pencilled eyebrow that curved dramatically at the edges. The result was an unkempt, delinquent appearance that complemented the bow, taffeta and glitter-heavy femininity of the clothes.

Yet, when it comes to this season’s messy beauty, no one did it better than the contingent of Japanese designers who show at Paris Fashion Week each season. At Comme des Garçons, hair by Takeo Arai and headpieces designed by HIZUME, combined to create a fascinating, strange beauty, with matted worms of hair – for lack of a better term – emerging from what looked like ripped sheer tights or oily bird’s nests.

At Yohji Yamamoto, black lips were paired with excessively gelled, Siouxsie Sioux-style hair. While at Junya Watanabe, hair stylist Eugene Souleiman and make-up artist Isamaya Ffrench created plastered-down, finger-wave wigs and streaming black eye makeup for a memorable 1920s-flapper-after-a-really-terrible-night look.

A similar look was also seen on the Saint Laurent runway, although more sleekly done, with hair gelled to helmet-like perfection and a flawlessly executed smoky eye and dark red lip (here, though, the inspiration seemed to be the severe beauty of Helmut Newton’s photographs of Saint Laurent in the 1970s). Demna’s first Gucci show also featured contoured cheeks, saturated red lips, and fanned-out smoky eyes. The most noteworthy saturated lips and smoky eye combination, however, was perhaps those at Tom Ford, where the velvet lips engineered by Lucy Bridge were so richly pigmented they looked almost fake.

Speaking of fake, there were those like Matières Fécales and Rick Owens who ostentatiously subverted beauty conventions with the use of prosthetics. The Matières Fécales collection, which satirised the style of the one per cent, translated the ideas behind its clothing into fake black eyes and faces practically deformed by plastic surgery.

While Owens, always one for bold beauty, built on the codes he’s been developing for years with make-up artist Daniel Sällström, to create eyes obscured by colour contacts and extra-long fake lashes that were emphasised by painterly strokes of neon eyeshadow. Sällström was also the make-up artist behind Vaquera’s white painted faces and multi-winged cat eyes, which combined to create a kind of modernised 18th-century aristocrat. The show also featured one model with lime-green pubic hair, which was, if nothing else, memorable.

But when it comes to the most memorable beauty look of the A/W 2026 runways, the winner might be a brand that was more playful than provocative. We are, of course, speaking about one of the most lauded shows of the season: Matthieu Blazy’s sophomore ready-to-wear outing at Chanel.

As the show progressed and the clothes transitioned into more iridescent evening wear, the subtle beauty of the runway looks began to take an iridescent sheen as well. Models’ slicked-back hair appeared covered in a glittery, chromatic coating with matching metallic eye make-up, while one particularly noteworthy look featured long, mermaid-style pastel locks with matching pastel eyeshadow. All in all, a shining end to the season.

Paris Fashion Week culminated yesterday, marking the end of a month-long season of shows that has seen previous stops in New York, London and Milan.

With a nine-day schedule standing at nearly double the length of its counterparts, Paris remains the defining city of fashion month – not least because it comprises shows from fashion’s heavyweight houses, among them Chanel, Dior, Louis Vuitton and Saint Laurent (to name just a handful).

After last season’s debuts dominated the S/S headlines, A/W 2026 was about the sophomore show, as designers settled into their positions as creative directors. Without the weight of expectation, we saw some brilliant shows – notably Jonathan Anderson at Dior, Michael Rider at Celine, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez at Loewe, and Matthieu Blazy at Chanel (all were showing their second ready-to-wear collections).

Here, reported by Wallpaper* fashion & beauty features director Jack Moss and contributing writer India Jarvis, we pick the standout shows that defined the week.

The best of Paris Fashion Week A/W 2026

Dior

Jonathan Anderson staged his A/W 2026 runway show for Dior in Paris’ Jardin des Tuileries, constructing a circular show set around one of the park’s ponds (for the occasion, it had been populated with Monet-esque lily pads, meticulously constructed to look like the real thing), while the invitation comprised miniature versions of the park’s signature green metal chairs. Across the pond’s centre ran an elevated runway, echoing the line of the Tuileries’ Grand Allée, a historic promenade since the park opened to the public in 1667 after a renovation by Louis XIV. It led to a collection about ‘seeing and being seen’, a contemporary imagining of the promenade, ‘[where] a walk in the park becomes a performance’. Cue a ‘panoply of Parisians’ in eclectic, time-hopping attire, from the woozy ruffles of the Belle Époque (here transformed into mini dresses with bouncing trains) to plays on bourgeois tropes, such as fabrics that recalled heritage tweeds, blazers with golden buttons, and shearling jackets reimagined with wave-like hems. What was most striking, though, was a feeling of levity: lily-pad-adorned footwear, polka-dot motifs and crystallised denim were both playful and pretty. ‘Dior has this giant past, and I had to start there,’ Anderson said. ‘Now I feel free to release it from that.’ Jack Moss

READ: Jonathan Anderson’s latest Dior show was a walk in the park

Saint Laurent

A cinematic offering from Anthony Vaccarello unfolded in a simulacrum of a sleek, modernist home; at its centre, a sized-up recreation of a bust that lived in Yves Saint Laurent’s own apartment. Through it strode this season’s Saint Laurent heroine, her heavy-smoked eye and slick, side-parted hair a nod towards Helmut Newton’s Paris Vogue photograph of a model in Yves Saint Laurent’s ‘Le Smoking’ tuxedo on Rue Aubriot in 1975. Indeed, tailoring was central to the A/W 2026 collection: eight trouser suits opened the show, while various other iterations appeared throughout (including Vaccarello’s own riff on the tuxedo, worn by model Loli Bahia, who walked exclusively for Saint Laurent this season and closed the show). Here, the silhouette was sloped across the shoulder and narrowed at the waist – though not constricted – for a riff on the power suit that was more ‘insouciant shrug than swagger’. As a counterpoint, Vaccarello looked towards the ‘troubled heroines’ of Gore Vidal and Tennessee Williams, as well as Romy Schneider in the 1971 film Max et les Ferrailleurs (she was this season’s protagonist, he said), to capture an ‘elegance tinged with ennui… the beauty of intimacy and vulnerability’. To capture this mood, a series of slips and dresses came in lace coated in silicone, while enormous fur coats had a vivacious confidence. Jack Moss

Dries Van Noten

For many of us, the stylings of awkward adolescence are best not dwelt upon – after all, who looked or felt their best as a teenager? Evidently, Julian Klausner takes a more romantic view of this impressionable time, but, then again, Klausner was likely a more sophisticated brand of teenager than most. In any case, this was the impression given by his A/W 2026 collection for Dries Van Noten, which was inspired in part by a visit to Lycée Carnot, and the memories of being an adolescent ‘work-in-progress’. The Lycée is a Rive Droite public school with alumni including Gilles Deleuze, Guy Debord, and Daft Punk, and its Gustave Eiffel-designed great hall has been the backdrop for numerous Paris fashion shows over the years – in other words, a suitably rarefied and creatively rich starting point.

The 61 looks at Dries Van Noten asked that most teenage question: who am I going to be today? For the confident moment, a navel-bearing button-up knit with a vibrant silk skirt. When a suit of armour is required, a protective duffel coat that does the talking for you. Or maybe one day the mood might be scholastic – collegiate blazer and pleated skirt, but always, always customised, an embellishment here, a contrasting trim there. ‘Just like a pixelated picture, the more one gets far from that time of endless questioning, the clearer it becomes,’ Klausner said, a metaphor he extended through prints with digitally warped 17th-century Flemish still life paintings. Opulent, mature fabrics and finishings were styled with a youthful irreverence best summarised by the final lines from Gala Dragot’s vocal performance, which soundtracked the show: ‘Don’t be too serious... Wear a collar... Keep it blurry though.’ India Jarvis

Acne Studios

If Dries Van Noten was an homage to the experimental attitude of youth, then Acne Studios marked its 30th birthday year with a collection that declared (as one does at 30): I know exactly who I am. A/W 2026 was an affirmation of the house’s irreverent signatures, such as a revival of the particular 1996 cut of jean that made their name, and photographic elements that nod to the brand’s unconventional marketing style, including the bi-annual Acne Paper.

The setting for this season was a succession of intersecting cuboid rooms that, viewed simultaneously from the end of the runway, appeared like a Josef Albers work made three-dimensional. According to Jonny Johansson’s show notes, this was conceived ‘like an enfilade of salons … the portals marking what has come before, and what might follow’. Where a salon in the Parisian tradition might mean a bringing together of clashing or complementary ideas, at Acne Studios, the determination is to blur those boundaries as much as possible. Standout looks saw cropped aviator jackets worn with skin-tight jodhpurs and desirable point-toe pumps, Prince of Wales check jackets worn over one shoulder, and larger-than-life portraits of art school students, taken by Paul Kooiker, printed onto stiff pencil skirts and draped dresses.

Alaïa

Late last year, just after the completion of the Italian house’s sale to Prada, it was announced that Dario Vitale would be leaving his position as creative director of Versace (he lasted a single, but impactful season), to be replaced by Belgian designer Pieter Mulier. It meant that this season’s Alaïa show, watched by designers Matthieu Blazy and Raf Simons, was to be his last: the swansong of a five-year tenure defined by commercial expansion and critical success (he has also established a coterie of model muses, many of whom walked this final show, and will likely follow him to Versace). Held in an intimate showspace in the former Fondation Cartier – Mulier said he wanted it to recall a 1990s pre-iPhone runway show – the collection itself eschewed his more recent experimental silhouettes in favour of stripping things back to the essence of the house, from simple body-contouring tank dresses to lean tailored overcoats, stretch knits, and peplums and ruffles (the last flourishes rendered in Mulier’s contemporary, streamlined style).

‘This collection is about clothes to wear. What is a jacket? What is a dress?’ he said backstage after the show. ‘It’s basically a vocabulary of the last five years. It’s what I learned at Alaïa, that I’m giving to the next designer. It’s like leaving the keys on the table. At Alaïa, I learned precision, editing and [that] real luxury is not what we all think. It is a perfectly cut jacket.’ Jack Moss

READ: Pieter Mulier delivers a swansong collection at Alaïa: ‘It is a vocabulary of the last five years’

Rabanne

Of all the distinct fashions of the long 20th century, it could be argued that 1940s style is the hardest to reference without veering into the territory of costume. Perhaps it’s because boxy tailored silhouettes and victory rolls are so much associated with the vast canon of British war movies, or perhaps because austerity-driven ‘make do’ dressing is antithetical to contemporary fashion at either end of the high-low scale. It’s a testament to Julien Dossena’s eye, then, that for Rabanne A/W 2026 he incorporated patently 1940s-inspired styles – T-bar heels, tea-dress florals, and clashing knitwear – without evoking even a hint of reenactment.

After all, Rabanne has always been a house noted for its futuristic bent. Unconventional, industrial materials, like metal and plastic, are at its very heart, and remained so this season alongside those more vintage ideas – coming together in a collection that the brand called ‘a little louche’. This take on modernist femininity was told through blink-and-you’ll-miss-it glimpses of a slip through an unbuttoned blouse, a hint of lace underneath a more conservative skirt, and pussybows left suggestively undone. Dossena told Wallpaper* post-show that the character he wanted to build with these contrasts was that of ‘a resistant woman’, and that for him, there was a suggestion of retro-futurism with the 1940s-derived shapes (for example, hair pulled into sculptural pompadour styles was less Vera Lynn and more replicants in Blade Runner). India Jarvis

Rick Owens

What might the cyberpunk cousin of Marlene Dietrich wear for a night on the town? It’s a question that could only be answered by Rick Owens – whose A/W 2026 collection was an homage to the ‘dignified sequence of her life stages’, all shot through with classics from his own particular design language. Think body parts augmented through prosthetics and sci-fi silhouettes in a post-apocalyptic landscape heavy with dry ice and punctuated by magnesium-bright beams of light. Presenting the collection as the second part of ‘Tower’, which premiered during the men's collections, Owens drew from Dietrich’s qualities of ‘steeliness’ and ‘grit’, and interpreted them as sheath-like dresses, abundant piles of faux fur, and flight jackets.

Just as the German star’s enduring legacy was in part a product of her striking collaborations with Josef von Sternberg, Owens is an artist quick to credit the rich input his work receives from his creative partners. This season, much attention has been lovingly devoted to name-checking the hands through which his raw materials pass – from the third-generation, family-run mill in Como, Italy, which weaves a high-performance fibre called Kevlar (purportedly five-times stronger than steel), to the Veneto-region wash house committed to reducing water waste, which treats industrial indigo canvas. India Jarvis

Loewe

Presented on a bright-yellow runway populated by German artist Cosima Von Bonin’s plush figures of clams, octopi and dogs, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez’s sophomore Loewe collection was a welcome jolt of energy on the Friday morning of Paris Fashion Week. ‘What is fashion but an open field for endless creative play?’ said the American designers, whose poppy A/W 2026 collection translated their colourful beach-ready debut for the winter months, resulting in a riot of curvy dégradé shearling parkas, 3D-printed slips and shaggy-hemmed dresses with trailing trains. Other elements had a sporting feel – like face-shielding sunglasses, boldly coloured anoraks and chunky riffs on half-zip ski sweaters – while inflatable elements meant garments could be transformed in size and proportion (a lobster-claw-shaped pump, shown at the re-see the following day, will be sold separately).

Such experiments were made possible by the abilities of the Loewe atelier, particularly when it came to leather: bouclé overcoats were made from intricate loops of leather yarn, while the gradient shearlings were treated ‘in the same manner as poodle grooming’. ‘As we began [creating] our second collection, we were struck by a simple truth: for us, the act of making is, at its core, an expression of joy – an intellectual, process-driven pursuit charged with playfulness,’ said the designers. ‘The path taken matters as much as the end result. It is the idea of play as rigorous experimentation and problem-solving, moving between instinct and experience, between a devotion to craft and its endless opportunities for innovation.’ Jack Moss

Issey Miyake

For Satoshi Kondo, the role of designer is as much about relinquishing control as it is wielding it. Knowing when to hold back, not to overstep the mark, to let the materials speak for themselves. This was the credo he brought to the fore for Issey Miyake’s A/W 2026 offering – a characteristically Japanese recognition of innate, simple beauty.

Titled ‘Creating, Allowing’, the collection navigated this specific tension understood by designers through pieces where the artist’s hand was inserted sparingly, never tampering with the true essence of the fabrication, only enhancing. At its best, this looked like expanses of cloth cut with technical lines that left their impression on the negative space, like the wine-coloured single-breasted coat with inbuilt cape that the model held up over her shoulders to exaggerate its rectangular construction. The innate movement of the house-signature pleats was used only intermittently and, instead, dramatically inflexible lacquered washi paper was introduced through breast plates, bodices and belts – creating a contrast between motion and restriction. Kondo’s intention with this was that the most important impact was made through the human frame, by ‘minimising design intervention and leaving the form-making to the wearer's own body’.

As for the space itself, the Carrousel du Louvre was transformed with a layer of silvery sand and ‘finely shredded aluminum foil, [serving] as a device for the interaction between "material", "people", and "clothing"’. This surface became marked and patterned as the models moved across it, another allusion to Kondo’s metaphor of ‘considered disruption’. India Jarvis

Lanvin

This year marks the centenary of menswear at the house of Lanvin – a celebration that filtered into the season’s womenswear outing through nods to the boyish silhouettes that characterised interwar ladies’ fashion. It was a time when overtly feminine curves were flattened into straight lines from bust to waist, creating an elongated, athletic outline that came to epitomise the emancipated New Woman.

Peter Copping, who took the reins at Lanvin in late 2024, imagined ‘a dialogue between generations’, which came together beautifully to meld the concerns of Jeanne Lanvin’s customers in the 1920s with those who shop the brand in the present. What do they have in common? Evidently, a love of opera – gloves were cuffed and elbow-length, and belted opera coats were voluminous enough to be worn over an evening gown, and trimmed with faux fur. They wear hats (Jeanne Lanvin’s first foray into fashion was as an apprentice milliner), with A/W 2026’s borrowing from cloche shapes but with exaggerated sou’wester-style brims. They favour a dash of restrained glamour. If some of the cuts leaned slightly austere, they were countered with an opulence of fabric and finish: hand-embroidered bead droplets, inky velvets, laser-cut fringes.

Lanvin is the oldest French maison still in operation, its HQ still in its original site – therefore, the weight of its legacy must hang heavily over every designer who takes its helm. Its founder insisted on le chic ultime, a phrase that surely needs no translation, and which is no small order. It is a comfort that, for every moment of reinvention it undergoes, Lanvin is still a place that women can go to for guaranteed elegance. India Jarvis

Givenchy

The idea of individual style was a throughline of Paris Fashion Week, one expressed by Sarah Burton with her third collection for Givenchy – the former Alexander McQueen designer’s most liberated outing yet (and, as a result, her best). ‘How can we put ourselves back together in the world we’re living in?’ was the question Burton asked this season, elucidating after the show that she was thinking about the multiplicities of a contemporary woman’s life (as such, it found a companion with the Prada show in Milan, where Miuccia Prada asserted that ‘as a woman, your life is layered – each day demands not only a shifting of clothes, but a richness of identities within yourself’). So there was some typically brilliant tailoring (Burton is known for her prowess in the medium, and has recently brought over her tailoring team from Alexander McQueen), though also more vivid expressions of style – a dress, hanging from razor-thin straps, in bright yellow leather; shimmering leopard spots that burst into tassels; silk T-shirts that had been refashioned by Stephen Jones into headpieces – as well as oversized riffs on carpenter jeans, off-the-shoulder bombers, and high-collared white shirts. ‘I wanted to make it feel very personal,’ said Burton. ‘Each woman is her own person, each silhouette is her own character.’ Jack Moss

Junya Watanabe

Junya Watanabe lets the clothes do the talking. The A/W 2026 collection was accompanied by show notes that came to two single sentences: ‘The Art of Assemblage Couture explores form born from pure creative instinct, free from conventional notions of dressmaking. Through the direct presentation of raw materials, this approach expresses the surrounding social environment.’ This succinct summary belied a frenzy of ideas, which played out over one of the most entertaining shows of the week.

Classic couture silhouettes were fashioned from a mish-mash of consumer goods and mass-produced garments. The opening look, worn by Irina Shayk, comprised a gown in a 1950s prom style, constructed from gloves, with a mesh flounce. A puff-sleeved dress, with a squared neckline and a central slit that showed a silver interior, appeared to be made from a gold Mylar blanket – its creased folds still visible, like it had just been ripped from its packet. Another dress used kitschily patterned curtains, pinch pleats and all, for its full, trained skirt, while its bodice was made from – what else? – scrap number plates.

So far, so Watanabe, but this season offered more in the way of spectacle than just unconventional materials. In a more choreographed display than usual, Watanabe called in the services of Poland-born movement director Pat Boguslawski. He directed a languid yet melodramatic routine for Watanabe’s models, who threw garments onto chairs with tango-inspired passion, and turned their heads with the kind of simpering doe-eyed expressiveness of silent movie starlets. This reference was reinforced through Eugene Souleiman’s hair design, sculpted curls slicked to the foreheads and cheeks in the manner of Josephine Baker, and glam make-up by Isamaya Ffrench – winged, heavy-lashed and sometimes tear-streaked eyes. India Jarvis

Celine

It hasn’t taken long for Michael Rider to define a signature look at Celine: a preppy, uptown-inflected uniform that feels like a vision of Parisian style through American eyes (Rider had worked at Celine previously, under Phoebe Philo, though more recently headed up US label Polo Ralph Lauren). And it has worked: his collections thus far have felt like you could wear them off the runway and straight onto the street, full of clever riffs on quotidian pieces that will no doubt be much copied by lesser brands (they have also been full of great accessories, from abundant charm bracelets to colourful handbags and slipper-like loafers). For A/W 2026, Rider continued his upward trajectory with a show held at the Institut de France amid a series of beautiful modernist speakers in wood and metal, presenting a collection that favoured perennial style over ephemeral trends. ‘Celine is a style: a mix of old and new that feels urgent and dreamy,’ said Rider. ‘Making the things we all dream of finding and wearing.’ And in among this ready-to-wear wardrobe (in the truest sense), flourishes of the playful and the romantic emerged, from enormous sequins and flashes of animal print to feathered headpieces and bold punctuations of colour. ‘Putting on clothes, a look, can change the day – [it can] change how we walk and feel,’ said Rider. ‘I love that.’ Jack Moss

Hermès

Staged on a runway of moss and soil (strangely, a trend of the week, later seen at Miu Miu and Louis Vuitton), Nadège Vanhée’s latest outing for Hermès saw her conjure what she called a ‘liminal realm’ between dawn and dusk, earth and space. It lent the collection an alien, otherworldly feel: models emerged from glowing orbs and looped around the Garde Républicaine show space on an inky runway, which also inspired the clothing’s palette of deep blues, greys and black. Mashing up the equestrian codes that remain at the heart of Hermès – here, sliced-away jodhpurs-cum-cycling shorts, dressage blazers and knee-high leather boots – with lean, futuristic silhouettes, it was a clever hybrid of the past, present and future, a liminal realm of Vanhée’s own. Ostrich and leather jump suits, with contrasting knit sleeves, were the season’s show pieces – the result of the house’s superlative leather atelier, they straddled sex appeal and function – while visible zips added an almost sci-fi feel, running down the front of dresses or slicing across the chest of a jacket. Prints came via AM Cassandre, an art deco artist, and saw clouds intersected by a geometric structure – a reflection of Vanhée’s own juxtapositions between the graphic and the elemental. Jack Moss

Comme des Garçons

A strong Comme des Garçons collection saw Rei Kawakubo find solace in her favoured colour, black, which – save for a brief interlude in bright, candy pink – made up the majority of the A/W 2026 collection. And, while recent collections have seen Kawakubo grapple with tumultuous world affairs, the choice of the colour was not necessarily to represent grief or mourning – instead, the Japanese designer said it captured the expansiveness of the creative process. ‘I have come to realise that, after all, black is the colour for me,’ she said in a typically brief statement issued to the press. ‘It’s just the strongest, the best for creation, and the colour that embodies the rebellious spirit. And has the biggest meaning: the universe and the black hole.’ Indeed, the use of a single colour allowed Kawakubo’s typically provocative forms to come to the fore: this season, pillow-like constructions draped in semi-sheer black tulle, undulating pile-ups of shirred ruffles and tassels, or saucer-shaped protusions that looped around the upper body. Like any Comme collection, it was a Rorschach test – revelling in the unfamiliar, Kawakubo always challenges you to draw your own conclusions. Jack Moss

Balenciaga

Of all the creative directors at the nascent stages of new tenures, Pierpaolo Piccioli might have one of the steepest mountains to climb at Balenciaga. In the 16 years he spent at Valentino, prior to taking this new position in the spring of 2025, he demonstrated a Cristóbal Balenciaga-worthy approach to dressmaking that prioritised proportion and colour. But while Piccioli was sending out breathtaking confections of ballooning silk taffeta at Valentino, Balenciaga the brand was being injected with a new edge, at the hand of Vetements-founder Demna, whose zeitgeist-defining designs were laced with subversion and irony. How to bring the grandeur and romance that are Piccioli’s calling cards, without alienating the new demographic of customers who flocked to the brand under Demna?

For this season, his second collection, Piccioli pinned his hopes on a collaboration with Sam Levinson – the creator of Euphoria, the teen drama responsible for making internationally recognised stars out of its cast, which includes Jacob Elordi, Sydney Sweeney, and Hunter Schafer. Audiences at the Balenciaga A/W 2026 show were treated to a preview of clips from the HBO show’s third series (airing publicly in April), which played on screens across the venue; its interplay of light and dark was found running through the collection, which Piccioli had titled ‘ClairObscur’. The collection itself was a largely black affair, in light-catching high-gloss fabrics, punctuated by the occasional neon-toned print that harkened to Euphoria's colour-saturated visual style. If Euphoria – boundary-pushing, youth-orientated, and ever so slightly contentious – feels more spiritually within Demna’s wheelhouse than Piccioli’s, the High Renaissance references (‘ClairObscur’ is a play on clair-obscur or chiaroscuro, the artistic style beloved by Mannerist painters, which manifests as dramatically contrasting tones to create intense depth) brought proceedings firmly back into Piccioli’s world. India Jarvis

READ: Balenciaga taps Euphoria’s Sam Levinson for A/W 2026

Jean Paul Gaultier

After the shock factor of his debut last season – one which divided both critics and online commentators with its barely-there silhouettes and trompe l’oeil prints of nude bodies – Dutch designer Duran Lantink seemed to hit his stride this season, using his eye for the surreal and the sculptural to create a disruptive cast of archetypes, from the raver to the cowboy. Marlene Dietrich (or, more specifically, a treasured mesh T-shirt printed with the filmstar that Lantink had found in a vintage shop) was one figure on the moodboard, inspiring the clever opening tailoring, which came with jutting folds and sculpted lapels, while also being printed on a dress installed with dry ice (a nod to her favoured vice – cigarettes). The designer said she was a master in subverting tropes: ‘dominant, sexy and graceful, the ultimate hybrid’ – a mood that informed the shape-shifting collection. Tailoring metamorphosed into tech-y sportswear, trompe-l’oeil bodysuits of artist’s dummies were overlaid with lingerie, and puffer jackets became bodysuits. ‘It’s a spirit that suits the house of Gaultier, a place where the world is perpetually turned upside down,’ said Lantink via press notes. ‘Feminine and masculine, inside out, vintage and new, underwear as outerwear, technical and tailored all at once.’ Jack Moss

Chanel

Matthieu Blazy said that his sophomore ready-to-wear collection began with a quote from house founder Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel. ‘Fashion is both caterpillar and butterfly. Be a caterpillar by day and a butterfly by night,’ she said. ‘There is nothing more comfortable than a caterpillar and nothing more made for love than a butterfly. We need dresses that crawl and dresses that fly.’ It seemed an apt description for Blazy’s own vision for Chanel thus far, one which elevates the quotidien through expressive acts of craft, and finds joy in both the functional and the glamorous. These are special clothes, no doubt (as anyone who has had the chance to see them up close can attest), though they are designed to be worn, not simply exalted. As such, he will no doubt be satisfied by the busy shop floors earlier this week as his debut collection landed (it was an ongoing fashion-week talking point), and more so to see those purchases worn by attendees to the show on Monday evening (and not just by the usual high-spending customers, but editors and stylists alike).

Staged amid a series of vast primary-coloured cranes – Blazy is, after all, still in the process of constructing his Chanel – the designer’s A/W 2026 collection was a brilliant and comprehensive exercise in wardrobing, which, to borrow Coco Chanel’s categorisation spanned the ‘caterpillar’ (roomy blazers, tweeds reformulated into lumberjack-style overshirts, simple jersey dresses), but also the ‘butterfly’. The latter came in an extraordinary stream of lustrous, colour-sturated looks at the end of the show, loaded with embellishment – appliqué flowers, lace and beads – and matched with models’ pastel-coloured or metallic hair. Over the 78 looks, there was a multitude of iterations of the Chanel woman, and the accessories to match (from gleaming metallic court shorts, to squashy crescent-shaped bags that recalled croissants). ‘Chanel is day, Chanel is night. It represents the freedom to choose between the caterpillar and the butterfly whenever you want,’ said Blazy. ‘I wish to create a canvas for women to be unapologetically who they are and who they want to be.’ Jack Moss

READ: Matthieu Blazy’s sophomore Chanel collection is made for ‘women to be unapologetically who they are’

Louis Vuitton

Nicolas Ghesquière staged his A/W 2026 collection for Louis Vuitton amid a show set by Severance production designer Jeremy Hindle, seeing rolling green hills – like those found in pastoral landscapes – abstracted into a series of sharp, futuristic peaks. The collection itself had a similar rationale, drawing inspiration from nature – ‘mountains, forests, plains’, and the clothing traditionally used to live among such elemental landscapes – and reimagining them through a series of Ghesquière’s typically idiosyncratic, time-travelling silhouettes. The idea of expedition seemed a throughline – supersized-wide-shouldered jackets, shearling hats and furry-hooded duffel coats seemed primed for protection, while bags hung on leather staffs like bindles – though there was a ceremonial feel to garments, which recalled traditional rural dress (though, in Ghesquière style, they were mashed up in such a way that the references were hard to place). ‘It is not an escape from our realities, but an echo of them,’ said Ghesquière of the vivid collection, which also featured the ‘urban pastoral’ works of Ukrainian artist Nazar Strelyaev-Nazarko. ‘[It is] a new folklore, for the future.’ Jack Moss

Miu Miu

Miuccia Prada has long interrogated a woman’s place in the world: how they move through it, and a wardrobe that feels reflective of their needs. For A/W 2026, she was thinking about the ‘smallness of the body’ – not in its physical proportions, but in opposition with the vastness of the world around us. It feels like a response to our current era of overload: the runway at Palais d’Iéna was covered in a layer of soil and moss, a reminder that beyond the pomp and ceremony of luxury fashion, we are simply humans living in communion with the earth (as a seatmate commented, perhaps this was her instruction to ‘touch grass’). ‘I am obsessed with the smallness of the body – in a human sense, the contrast between ourselves, our bodies and the vastness of that which surrounds us,’ she said. ‘Who we are, and the scale and magnitude of what we have to face. This collection is not about fragility – there is a confidence, and a strength. But always about a confrontation between a human and the expansiveness of the world.’

As such, the collection segued between moments of strength and intimacy: for the former, enveloping trapper hats, hiking shoes and sporty shearling-lined parkas, for the latter, slip dresses, satin shoes and bejewelled embellishment. There felt something of the 1990s to it: not only in the more minimal looks, which intersected the middle of the show, but in that contrast between glamour and utility (a parka over a mini dress; a studded handbag; a block heel), and also the appearance of Chloë Sevigny, a longtime house muse who first walked for Miu Miu in 1996. She was joined by a coterie of ‘individuals’ on the runway, from models Gemma Ward and Kristen McMenamy to the actress Gillian Anderson, who closed the show. Jack Moss

READ: Miu Miu’s all-star cast for A/W 2026 featured Gillian Anderson and Chloë Sevigny

All change! So could be the motto of the S/S 2026 season, which heralded the arrival of 15 new creative directors at fashion’s major houses – from Dior to Chanel.

It led to a sweeping feeling of freshness and renewal that would define the season, one that Wallpaper* captures in a new series of images by photographer Nicole Maria Winkler and Wallpaper* fashion & creative director Jason Hughes.

S/S 2026’s standount looks in the fitting room

Originally featured in our March 2026 Style Issue, they capture model Valerija Kelava dressing up in a series of S/S 2026’s standout looks – whether the rising Belgian design Julie Kegels’ collaged layers (she said she wanted the collection to feel like it had a life of its own) or a sweeping white gown from Jonathan Anderson’s first Dior collection, delicately edged with flowers.

The setting is a surreal imagining of a fitting room by set designer Kim Harding, Winkler’s longtime collaborator. Within it, we explore the transformative power of a new season of looks. Keep scrolling to shop the story.

Model: Valerija Kelava at Oui Management. Casting: Esther Boiteux at EB Agency. Hair: Moe Mukai using Oribe. Make-up: Sunao Takahashi at Saint Luke using Byredo. Set design: Kim Harding Studio. Digi tech: Anna-Sophia John. Photography assistants: Josh Rea, Elliot Humbles. Set design assistant: Austeja Gokaite. Fashion assistant: Lucy Proctor. Production assistant: Danielle Quigley.

A version of this story appears in the March 2026 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, available on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + now. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Shop the story

And so concludes another Milan Fashion Week, a season marked by its debuts: across the week, Maria Grazia Chiuri presented her opening vision for Fendi as the house’s first sole creative director, young Belgian designer Meryll Rogge made an expressive debut at Marni, and Demna hosted his first runway show for Gucci – a virile mediation on sex and the body which had everybody in fashion talking. Meanwhile at Giorgio Armani, Silvana Armani – the niece of the late eponymous designer – made her ready-to-wear debut at the house. Though true to Mr Armani’s well-established codes, she said this was ‘a new perspective on the Armani style’ – light, fluid and purposely ‘imperfect’.

Alongside, there were standout shows from Prada – in a feat of quick changes and expert layering, 15 models wore 60 looks without pause – and Bottega Veneta, where Louise Trotter conjured Maria Callas and Pier Paolo Pasolini in a riot of colour and texture. While at Jil Sander, Simone Bellotti found new freedom in his sophomore runway show after the rigour and restraint of his debut.

Here, reported by Wallpaper* fashion & beauty features director Jack Moss and contributing writer India Jarvis, the 14 standout shows which defined the week.

Fendi

‘Less I, More Us,’ was the mantra Italian designer Maria Grazia Chiuri chose for her debut as sole creative director for Fendi, emblazoning it across the runway which stretched the length of the house’s Milanese HQ on Via Solari. Chiuri is fond of such mission statements: for her debut collection as the first female creative director of Dior in 2016, she printed the title of Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s book-length essay ‘We Should All Be Feminists’ across a T-shirt. Over the nine years which followed, she would champion numerous women artists and collaborators.

Her mantra at Fendi is perhaps a feminist one too, despite the fact that Chiuri also showed menswear on the runway (and will be equally in charge of the house’s mens- and womenswear lines). It was, in part, a reference to the collective force of the formidable Fendi sisters: Alda, Carla, Paola, Franca and Anna Fendi, who took over from their parents, house founders Edoardo and Adele Fendi, in 1946. Speaking before the show, she said that people speak too often of Karl Lagerfeld’s influence – the designer was creative director of the house for 54 years – and not enough of the sisters, who employed him and would work alongside him until the company was sold to LVMH in 1999. ‘I would like people to remember all that they created at Fendi,’ she asserted.

Chiuri, who began her career at Fendi in 1989, working with the sisters until her own departure in 1999, said she credits her working ethic to them: ‘They were my mentors. They gave me my career. And I felt part of their teamwork.’ In the show, the idea of collaboration came through projects with women artists SAGG Napoli (colourful football-like scarves were created alongside the Naples-born artist) and the estate of Mirella Bentivoglio, whose slogan-like works appeared across garments. But the idea of a collective ‘us’ stretched to dissolving the divide between mens- and womenswear, too, the designer said: ‘Feminine and masculine cease to be categories of opposition and become adjectives used to describe shared qualities,’ envisioning not two separate collections but ‘one wardrobe’.

As such, the A/W 2026 outing – which eschewed theatrics in favour of a more pragmatic approach – moved between sleek, elongated tailoring and flourishes of romance, from layers of sheer tulle and lace (some evocative of her work at Dior). Meanwhile fur – the founding material of the house – came back to the fore, with Chiuri introducing the ‘Echo of Love’ project whereby clients can have their old furs transformed in an act of circularity. Across vivid two-tone chubby fur coats and patchworked fur handbags, all the materials had been sourced from leftovers in the house’s fur department – another act of practicality over spectacle. ‘Fashion is not entertainment. Fashion is a job. I am that kind of designer,’ she said. Jack Moss

READ: ‘Less I, more us’: Maria Grazia Chiuri lays out her vision for Fendi in Milan

Jil Sander

After a brilliant debut last season, Simone Bellotti continued to cleverly hone his vision for Jil Sander with a sophomore collection which he said was inspired by the idea of ‘home’. Presented in the house’s stark Milanese HQ – this season, warmth was added by the addition of a rust-coloured carpet which had been installed the length of the upper floor – the former Bally designer said he was thinking about home as an ‘an emotional space where one lives, feels safe and belongs to’, leading to a collection which diverted from restraint and rigour of last season towards something freer, more eclectic. Indeed, the designer said this was a collection about ‘flow, flou [and] movement’, with Bellotti imagining garments imbued with a life of their own through an intriguing use of pattern cutting – whether raised shoulder lines, curving seams, folded waistlines, or intentionally puckered tailoring (the slashes through garments also returned from his debut). Meanwhile evocative moments of colour and pattern added visual richness: flashes of electric blue and leopard print met fabrics evocative of interiors – a nod, Bellotti elucidated, to his father’s career as an upholsterer. ‘The question this season is whether abandon can convey restraint,’ he said of this newly liberated approach. Jack Moss

MM6 Maison Margiela

One of life’s great pleasures is watching other people, and what better place to sit and do it than a train terminal? It’s a pleasure that MM6 Maison Margiela tapped into for its A/W 2026 show – one designed around the comings and goings of passengers in an ‘archetypal train station’, in this case Milano Centrale. An archetype is a recurrent, even constant, principle, whereas a station is innately transient – how do the two meet? At MM6 it was with ‘a veritable spectrum of individuality’, and ‘sartorial actions rooted in the genuine appreciation for garments as they are, looking for ways to see them anew, which is where the fun lingers.’

What does that look like? It looks like pea coats with bunched and scrunched hems, loosely tacked to reveal quilted or flannel linings. Clashing stripes with check – something you might serendipitously pair when hurrying to get dressed. Backless khaki trench coats and skirts. And lots of tucking: hair tucked into jumpers, jumpers tucked into jeans, jeans tucked into high-gloss Wellington-style boots.

There was a strong equine theme too – afterall, 2026 is the year of the firehorse, a symbol of forward movement and independence that is characteristically MM6 – from horse motifs printed on oversized T-shirts and teddy fleeces, to full cotton flounced skirts with a decidedly American frontier feel. A train station welcomes all kinds of people going all kinds of places, after all. India Jarvis

Prada

This season, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons played a clever runway trick: instead of the usual 40-or-so models cast in a given season, the pair chose just 15 to walk the A/W 2026 show. In an impressive act of timing, they wore 60 looks in total, walking the runway four times each in quick succession, achieved through removing a layer of clothing during each quick change. When you realised the conceit (for me, I wondered if Bella Hadid had a doppelganger or secret twin after what seemed like an impossibly quick reappearance on the runway), it made for one of the most thrilling Prada shows of recent times – there was a near-breathless energy to the spectacle. (Indeed, chatting to one of the models backstage, she said she had never sweated so much, or walked so far, in a runway show during her career.)

But this was no gimmick: post-show, the co-creative directors said the collection was a reflection of the way that women wear clothing on a given day – the removal of a coat to reveal a cocktail dress, the addition of a scarf. ‘It’s about life, and how you dress each day with the clothes you have,’ said Simons. ‘About real, human people.’ The garments themselves were infused with Prada-isms: purposeful marks of wear (some appeared stained or creased; others saw layers of fabric torn away to reveal another beneath) met an insouciant, bourgeois-inflected glamour in embroidered stockings, feathered and beaded footwear and a use of satin and organza. A feeling of utility, meanwhile, came in uniform-style tailoring and riffs on classic outerwear styles, from the parka jacket to the raincoat. ‘As a woman, your life is layered – each day demands not only a shifting of clothes, but a richness of identities within yourself,’ said Mrs Prada. ‘You make choices, you decide who you want to be.’ Jack Moss

Max Mara

Is a growing interest in the history and aesthetics of the Middle Ages a reaction to the hyper-digitised, blue-lit world of today? An idealised fantasy of a pre-capitalist society? Or perhaps a byproduct of the popularity of the romantasy genre? Whatever the answer, for Max Mara’s Ian Griffiths​, whose unlikely seasonal muse was the 11th-century diplomat and military commander Matilde di Canossa, ‘there is something so strikingly of the now about so-called Dark Age design’.

Griffiths’ interpretation of pre-enlightenment era clothing saw tunics in luxurious, butter-soft suede, ankle-skimming cashmere coats and hooded garments reminiscent of the coif shapes worn by Di Canossa and her contemporaries. Standout pieces included a caramel-coloured bias-cut silk gown with a mohair, funnel-necked yoke; a suede muff worn belted around the waist; and a taupe wool playsuit accessorised with the gathered suede, elbow-length opera gloves that were seen throughout the show. Griffiths has been with the house since graduating from London’s RCA in 1987, and over the four decades which have followed, there is nobody who knows the Max Mara woman better than he. The A/W 2026 collection offered new-yet-medieval twists on the tried and tested house codes, which keep this woman returning to the brand, season after season. India Jarvis

Emporio Armani

Following the death of its eponymous founder in the autumn of 2025, Emporio Armani took an understandable hiatus from showing at menswear week in January, but returned for A/W 2026 with a combined men’s and women’s runway outing. ‘Maestro’, as the collection was titled, was not only a narrative device, but an ode to Mr Armani himself – the eminent composer, conductor, and virtuoso of fashion symphonies for almost 50 years.

The imaginative backdrop for the season was, according to show notes, a music school, and the maestro – and maestra, for this is a co-ed conservatoire – who stepped out in Leo Dell’Orco and Silvana Armani’s first jointly developed collection wore loosely tailored overcoats and baggy denim, and student-y accessories including baker boy caps, backpacks, and ties just visible beneath oversized striped knits. Leg warmers styled over patent leather pumps evoked the chill of a rehearsal auditorium, whereas the show’s second act saw rather more performance-ready pieces in the form of draped velvet, wide-lapelled tuxedo jackets, and starched white collars (a recurring motif in Milan this season: most notably in Maria Grazia Chiuri’s riff on Claudine à l'école at Fendi).

For the finale – the crescendo, if you like – the models turned out in Lydia Tár-esque monochrome. Tight leggings or flowing slacks on the bottom, white dress shirts on top, each with a different button, brooch, pin, collar, or embroidered flourish. ‘A simple and rigorous statement – now more than ever rebellious – of modernity and self-awareness,’ that could only be Armani. India Jarvis

Marni

The Belgian designer Meryll Rogge chose to collaborate with Formafantasma on the runway set for her debut show as creative director of Marni. Transforming the house’s Milanese headquarters with wood-effect panelling and fabric-covered benches – recalling a banal office space, or entranceway to a Milanese apartment block – the space was punctuated with mirrored panels which had been painted with ‘fragments drawn from quotidian life’, from office chairs to cigarette lighters. ‘The structure of the set suggests a bourgeois interior wooden frame, hints of domestic architecture – but fragmented, slightly taken apart. It feels familiar yet unsettled, as if a room has been carefully disassembled and reassembled in another order,’ Formafantasma’s Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin told Wallpaper*.

It linked with Rogge’s vision for her tenure at the Italian house: to create something which felt both familiar and contemporary, evoking Marni’s founding principles with her own distinctive twists. ‘I have a very personal connection to Marni,’ she said. ‘It’s a brand that shaped my design sensibility during my formative years, and through the show I wanted to acknowledge that sense of familiarity.’ It made for an astute opening outing: there was the irreverent spirit of founder Consuelo Castiglioni in its eclectic combinations, not only in its amalgam of nostalgic prints, swinging paillettes and boldly graphic jewellery, but also in the way a sweater might be worn with a cocktail dress, or a colourful sporty parka over a suit and tie. Rogge’s own twist on the Marni protagonist was a newfound toughness, figured in some great leather trousers and skirts, some with Western-inspired detailing. In their slung-on sensuality – imbued with a certain 1980s nostalgia – they might well fill a gap for those who are already missing Dario Vitale’s Versace. Jack Moss

READ: Formafantasma created the ‘familiar yet unsettled’ show set for Meryll Rogge’s Marni debut

Sportmax

If there are a few thematic ideas that inevitably crop up and play out in different ways by different brands in any one season, then for A/W 2026 one such example could be travel. At Loro Piana and MM6 Maison Margiela the vehicle of choice was a train; at Sportmax, the journey seemed to be taken by air. ‘Dynamism’ was the word they used, but ‘aerodynamism’ may be just as apt – as the brand itself puts it: ‘There is no clutter weighing the Sportmax woman down.’

Dresses were close-fitting and body-skimming but with movement in the draping, worn with long wraps which fell backwards over the shoulder like wings. Some of the weightier outerwear nodded to aviator-style jackets with their gargantuan lapels and collars, and contrasting textures and fabrics. Clutches were spheroid, almost discus-shaped; one could imagine them flying through the air with ease. Flashes of skin were visible beneath a kind of jumbo mesh effect leather, used for tops which were worn as a base layer beneath more autumn-winter suitable coats and gilets. Speed and movement were the defining characteristics of the collection – even the show itself was a particularly fast-paced affair – as the show notes said, the Sportmax woman has ‘places to go’. India Jarvis

Gucci

Prior to his debut runway show for Gucci, the mononymous Georgian designer Demna said he had been searching for the ‘Gucciness of Gucci’, a trip which took him to the Tuscan city of Florence, where the house was founded as a leather goods company in 1921. There, he visited factories and the archive, though it was stood in front of Sandro Botticelli’s The Birth of Venus at the Uffizi Gallery – just a few hundred metres from the Palazzo Gucci on Piazza della Signoria – that Demna had his lightbulb moment. ‘Standing in front of it, I felt overwhelmed,’ he wrote in a letter distributed before the show. ‘The beauty in it was unconditional; it was absolute. It made me realise how deeply the Italian Renaissance shaped everything I understand about art, about proportion, about desire, and about beauty. When I left the museum and stepped into Piazza della Signoria, the first thing I saw was Palazzo Gucci. In that moment, I understood the place Gucci holds within Italian culture.’

It was part of the reason why he staged the A/W 2026 collection amid an imagined museum constructed in Milan’s Palazzo delle Scintille, clad in marble and populated with plaster recreations of ancient sculptures (the vast statues had been 3D-scanned and crafted by Tuscan artisans to appear as if hewn from marble). This was a veneration of Gucci as an expression of Italian style and insouciance: after the show, he said this opening act was simply about capturing a feeling, rather than anything more intellectually overwrought. ‘I hope I made you feel Gucci today,’ he said, expressing a desire for Gucci to become an ‘adjective’. ‘That was my main purpose with this show.’

The essence of ‘Gucci-ness’ that Demna landed on was one of unbridled sensuality, a morning-after-the-night before glamour which borrowed from Tom Ford’s transformative tenure at the house in the 1990s (all the way down to a recreation of his 1997 double-G G-string, which here appeared as an in-built thong in a gown worn by Kate Moss to close the show). Other garments had been constructed without seams or with curved hemlines in order to emphasise the relationship between body and garment, while muscled male models burst out of skin-tight T-shirts and jeans. Slung on jackets, lean tailoring, and a final flurry of shimmering evening gowns completed the look. ‘[I think] it’s because of my relationship with myself, to my own body, to the way I want to see myself,’ he said. ‘I want to feel like that. I want to feel sexy.’ Jack Moss

Tod’s

It takes deft craftsmanship to imbue leather with real lightness – after all, leather is better known as a material of protection and toughness. But Tod’s’ A/W 2026 ready-to-wear was characterised by a levity of touch that could only be the handiwork of a house that makes an art out of leather (and a designer who’s got pedigree when it comes to this particular material).

In Matteo Tamburini’s latest, leather may have been the protagonist, but the plot itself was all about artisanal excellence – a fact reinforced by the real craftspeople stitching, folding, or carving objects in the entryway to the venue at Padiglione d'Arte Contemporanea – cherry-picked by the brand for their impressive skill. Amongst these were brothers Vincenzo and Manuel Aucella, coral artisans and cameo carvers who represent the fourth generation of a family tradition that began in 1892 (that’s around 30 years before Filippo Della Valle started the shoe-making business that would later become Tod’s).

As for the clothes themselves, feather-light asymmetrical leather dresses fluttered with all the delicacy of a silk handkerchief, blanket-style outerwear enveloped luxuriously about the shoulders, and saddlery techniques and hand-finishing synthesised tradition and modernity. Overall, the effect was a masterclass in Italian craft and sprezzatura. India Jarvis

Ferragamo

The 1920s were a formative decade for Salvatore Ferragamo: in 1927, he founded his eponymous footwear company in Florence after returning from Los Angeles, where he worked as a shoemaker for the burgeoning film industry in Hollywood. The British designer Maximilian Davis has found fertile creative ground in the decade, with recent collections channelling what he sees as the ‘liberated elegance’ of the era – one in which conventions of dress were interrupted and marginalised groups found new freedoms (last season, Davis evoked the Harlem Renaissance, the proliferation of Black art, culture and intellectual output from the New York neighbourhood in the 1920s).

This season, in one of the curving Giovanni Muzio-designed upper galleries of the Triennale di Milano museum – dimly lit and sheathed with floor-to-ceiling curtains – he evoked the 1920s speakeasy, ‘a locus of liberation; a space where conventions of class and identity are disrupted’. As such, a louche, after-dark mood infused the collection – negligées, molten-gold dresses and vampish stilettos all featured – while riffs on maritime attire were a nod to those who frequented such drinking spots. Though the evocation of the sailor also nodded to the notion of travel which informs the Ferragamo story – the transformative experience of moving away from your home in search of something new.

‘That’s something that both Salvatore and my own family experienced – he left his home in Italy for America before returning home, and my family moved from Trinidad and Jamaica to Manchester,’ said Davis. ‘They all crossed the water to discover new beginnings.’ Jack Moss

Dolce & Gabbana

Dolce & Gabbana’s A/W 2026 collection was an assertion of brand identity, said designers Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana, all the way down to a front-row cameo from Madonna – perhaps the most well-known house muse and the current face of The One fragrance. The musical powerhouse watched on from the front row as the pair performed their own greatest hits: an outing near-entirely in their signature vampish black, replete with house hallmarks – lingerie-inspired silhouettes, hourglass LBDs, and, of course, plenty of lace. Though perhaps most desirable this season was the tailoring: if best known for their body-contouring dresses, the pair have always possessed a strong sartorial prowess, here encapsulated in some brilliant tuxedos which nipped at the waist and flared across the shoulder, inspired by archival silhouettes from the 1990s (they would make a great Oscars look for those wishing to eschew the traditional princess gown). Post show, Domenico and Stefano were keen to make clear that drilling into the archive was not about ‘nostalgia’ but ‘presence’, ‘a language built on roots that are still alive – Sicily as emotion, black as strength, lace as intimacy, tailoring as authority,’ they said. Jack Moss

Bottega Veneta

The particular joy of good fashion is that it’s a work of art you can actually touch – and with Louise Trotter’s sophomore collection for Bottega Veneta, touch is exactly what you want to do. The shaggy, curvaceous shapes she creates out of fibreglass need to be felt to be believed. Great piles of shearling cry out to be fondled. Even less immediately showy pieces, like a tailored grey coat with exaggeratedly round shoulders and cinched waist which was made from a thick, almost foamy looking fabric, was just begging to be squished between the fingers.

It’s the mark of a talented designer that to describe their work as ‘wearable’ doesn’t just mean ‘commercial’, or, worse ‘boring’. The Sunderland-born designer, whose previous creative director roles were at Lacoste, Joseph, and Carven, makes clothes that are infinitely wearable, but here the word might mean things that feel really wonderful to actually wear. On the practical side: pieces have pockets, shoes are flat, and bags are roomy. The more flamboyant garments are countered by easy tank tops and shirts. But more than that, there is a sensuality and tactility that sets Trotter’s work apart. Is this the byproduct of being one of the few women making womenswear at the head of a luxury house? Whatever the case, there’s no doubt that she is one of the most credible designers working today.

The A/W 2026 collection carried what Trotter described as a ‘suggestion’ of Maria Callas and Pier Paolo Pasolini – two of 20th-century Italy’s most erudite and subversive exports, and unlikely friends. Both figures have been brought back to the forefront of the cultural conversation in recent years – operatic prima donna Callas was played by Angelina Jolie in a 2024 biopic, and before that her life and lonely, premature death was dramatised on stage in an opera project conceived by Marina Abramović and co-starring Willem Dafoe. Dafoe, in turn, has played Pasolini, the poet and filmmaker whose brutal murder, presumably at the hands of far-right thugs, was commemorated on its 50th anniversary in the autumn of 2025 through a series of cultural programming and new publications. If these sound like unlikely characters to influence a ready-to-wear collection, consider that Callas and Pasolini had more in common than just tragic ends: formidable artistic talent, potent sexuality, and confident personal style amongst them. For Trotter’s debut last year she described her use of intrecciato as a conceptual device as well as a literal braiding technique – by citing these two artists she is articulating a continuation of that weaving principle, but also making a bold declaration of what Bottega Veneta, under her stewardship, is going to be. India Jarvis

Giorgio Armani

The Armani Privé show in Paris marked the debut collection from Silvana Armani, the late Giorgio Armani’s niece, who worked closely with the designer in his lifetime and was a fitting successor to uphold his legacy. On Sunday in Milan, she made her ready-to-wear debut at Armani, selecting the house’s headquarters on Brera’s Via Borgonuovo to show the A/W 2026 collection (the address was also the site of Mr Armani’s personal Milan home). At the time of the Privé show, we wrote that she had presented a collection ‘not of divergence but of continuance’, and the same could be said of this collection – it felt recognisably Armani in its louche, unstructured tailoring and interplay between Eastern and Western tropes of dress – though there was a greater feeling of softness and ease. Indeed, Silvana Armani said she was looking for lightness in both construction and spirit: jackets were assembled without padding, wrapped silhouettes appeared thrown on, and the slouchier, pleated trousers – held in place with wide belts – felt contemporary in proportion. She called it ‘a new perspective on the Armani style,’ one which she said was informed by being a woman, designing for women. ‘It is fluid, enveloping, perfectly imperfect.’ Jack Moss

Optimism, colour and a sense of play are the order of the day as this season’s 12 standout looks and accessories spark a fresh start. As taken from the March 2026 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, we unpack S/S 2026’s defining trends.

Bold Texture

Above left.

For her Bottega Veneta debut, Louise Trotter channelled a feeling of ‘liberation’ through an expressive use of colour and texture, including a series of pieces constructed from strands of iridescent recycled fibreglass. In their dynamism, she sought to reflect the vibrant life of Laura Braggion, Bottega Veneta’s design director from 1985-2001, who was a member of Andy Warhol’s Factory before her time at the house.

Lucky charms

Above right.

The charm bracelet is an item of jewellery long said to bring luck andprotection. This season, the auspicious accessory enjoys a renaissance, thanks to Michael Rider at Celine: the designer’s debut ready-to-wear collection featured bracelets heavy with charms, from the house’s Triomphe monogram to heart-shaped padlocks, lockets and a helping hand, the latter a longtime symbol of prosperity and safety.

The 1990s slip

The 1990s’ mythic cool continues to be an influence on contemporary fashion (and looks set to carry on with the launch of Tate Britain’s blockbuster exhibition ‘The 90s’ in October). Few garments are more synonymous with the era than the slip dress, which had a rebirth on the runway this season, appearing at Victoria Beckham, Tom Ford and Wooyoungmi, where this negligee came edged in delicate fronds of lace.

A brand new bag

‘A study in intimacy’ is how Sarah Burton describes her first major bag launch for Givenchy. Titled the ‘Snatch’, its gently curved shape, which hooks over the shoulder and hugs neatly under the arm, is designed to echo Burton’s ready-to-wear, whether the cinched waist of a blazer or the curve of a bra top. The softness of the leather is an echo of this feeling of intimacy: ‘it pulls, cinches and embraces,’ she says.

Pyjama dressing

There is an undone elegance to the pyjama shirt, which appeared in various iterations this season – at Dries Van Noten, Dunhill and Dolce & Gabbana, among others. This striped offering, from Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello, is part of a collection of ‘ease and escapism’, in which Vaccarello sought to capture the inertia of a summer afternoon. ‘Everything feels light; shapes float rather than cling,’ he says.

Block colour

At Ferragamo, Maximilian Davis took inspiration from the dress codes of the 1920s, injecting modernity via vivid accessories – feathers sprouted from bags while mules came in luminous hues – and colour-blocked garments, like this graphic silk-panelled dress. Indeed, colour blocking was a throughline of the wider S/S 2026 season – collections from Celine, Jil Sander and Loewe all featured the expressive motif.

True blue

Blue provided a feeling of undeniable uplift this season, with the breezy hue colouring the runway at IM Men (part of a collection inspired by the work of ceramic artist Shoji Kamoda), Fendi, Tom Ford and Dolce & Gabbana. Over at Lanvin, Peter Copping paid homage to house founder Jeanne Lanvin’s love of the colour – a fascination that began with the vivid blue skies of Fra Angelico’s 15th-century frescoes.

A new summer shoe

Former Proenza Schouler designers Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez looked to artist Ellsworth Kelly for their debut collection for Loewe, channelling his ‘elemental colours’ and ‘chromatic intensity’ in a collection that sought a feeling of freedom and release. Sculpted leather dresses, flocked heels and vivid striped knits had a playful sensibility, injecting new energy into the Spanish house.

Extreme layering

Zane Li’s debut show for his eponymous New York label LII made a case for extreme layering, a playful theme that ran throughout the S/S 2026 season. At Issey Miyake, diaphanous layers of fabric were stretched over household objects to create surreal silhouettes, while rising Belgian designer Julie Kegels turned garments upside down and collaged them together, as if they had taken on a life of their own.

Shirt tales

Matthieu Blazy’s debut collection for Chanel featured a collaboration with Parisian shirtmaker Charvet. The designer drew inspiration from Coco Chanel’s love affair with polo player Boy Capel and the way she would purportedly share his clothing. Embroidered with ‘Chanel’ and crafted with a weighted hem, the poplin shirts capture Blazy’s knack for elevating the quotidian through meticulous acts of craft.

Standout specs

Sunglasses are for making a sartorial statement this season. Case in point: these goggle-like frames from Miu Miu, which appeared on the S/S 2026 runway in bright shades of yellow, orange and blue. Similar styles were seen at Loewe, Versace and Balenciaga, the latter presenting huge bug-eyed shades adorned with shimmering crystals and worn with gowns and opera gloves – a very modern proposition for eveningwear.

Vivid outerwear

Outerwear eschewed the usual hues of grey, brown and black for bold colours that befit spring. This red overcoat by Prada embodies the season’s optimism, appearing as part of a collection that was about capturing a mood of escapism. Colourful outerwear was also spotted at Auralee, Dries Van Noten and Saint Laurent by Anthony Vaccarello, the latter inspired by hazy summer days on New York’s Fire Island.

Shop the story

A version of this story appears in the March 2026 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + now. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Models: Pascal Thulin at Next, Marrit Krikke at Platform Agency. Casting: Leila at Suun Consultancy. Hair: Paula McCash using Babylisspro and Evopro. Make-up: Claire Urquhart at Julian Watson Agency using Make Up For Ever. Manicure: Saffron Goddard using Chanel La Base Camélia and La Crème Main. Digi tech: Cameron Williamson. Photography assistant: Lucas Bullens. Fashion assistant: Nathan Fox. Production assistant: Danielle Quigley.

Fashion industry authority Ilaria Icardi boasts an illustrious CV. Currently the womenswear ready-to-wear design director at Prada, Icardi began her career at Etro and Hugo Boss in Milan, before joining Tom Ford in Paris as senior womenswear designer at Yves Saint Laurent. Stints at Celine, Victoria Beckham and Bottega Veneta followed.

Throughout, she has nurtured a lifelong love of jewellery. ‘My papa was a jeweller,’ Icardi says. ‘After he passed away in 2017, I always pushed away this legacy, and the fact that I grew up in Valenza [Italy], which is a town where everyone does jewellery. I grew up with that heritage.’

In 2020, after moving to Paris, something shifted. ‘When you do fashion, you do accessories. I was working at brands where accessories are part of the outfit, part of the look. My friends kept asking me what jewellery I was wearing and why I wasn’t making my own – and so I decided to do it, on the side.’

Icardi established her eponymous brand with her brother Lorenzo Icardi, a gemologist, building on the history of the family jewellery business begun by their late father in the 1960s. It is a personal project, drawing on jewellery from their father Umberto’s archive and Icardi’s own designs. Each piece, handmade to order and crafted in Valenza, epitomises both strong, clean design and heritage craft.

Icardi began with a handful of pieces from her father’s archive, as well as jewellery she had created during the year, deciding to launch online only. ‘I love playing with images and creating a little bit of content is part of my job. Everything naturally melted together. I prepared a website with friends and people that work in the industry who I trust and I admire. Working in the fashion industry, you have the chance to meet fantastic people. I created this character, a woman whose jewellery is part of her wardrobe. I like clothes that you can wear every day, and I treat jewellery the same way.’

The youth of the brand has given Icardi the freedom to define a strong DNA. ‘We are not a brand that has been consolidated for 20 years. In jewellery, you have a lot of competition from big brands. In our pieces, the quality is there, and there is a consistency. I'm very grateful at the moment – we have good results and we are happy.’

Icardi is drawn to tough, bold silhouettes and organic textures in 18-carat gold, eschewing perfection to focus on organic forms. ‘I like layering, I like contrasts – it's a very schizophrenic approach. There is no logic or intellectualism behind it. I love gold. I love big, raw, chunky jewellery. I love jewellery from the 1930s and 1940s, but later pieces from the 1970s, 1980s and the beginning of 1990s are more me. I like bad taste and good taste coming together. It’s almost my motto.’

It is a magpie instinct that translates into an eclectic collection of jewellery, taking shape in fine, understated engagement rings (‘I’m a bit overwhelmed by the big engagement ring, the big diamond: I call mine the baby engagement for someone who doesn’t want to show off’, she says) and, on the other side of the spectrum, oversized, stand-out necklaces and bracelets.

In the short time the brand has been established, Icardi has quickly garnered acclaim. Recently, her jewellery was worn by Julia Roberts in Luca Guadagnino’s upcoming film, After the Hunt. ‘Giulia [Piersanti, the costume designer] is a good friend of mine. We have a very similar aesthetic, and we support each other professionally. There is a classicism throughout. Julia Roberts is wearing the jewellery, but it doesn't take over the scene. It's almost part of her character. I'm very grateful, because in all my years working in the industry, people have been lovely and very supportive. I'm still very small and my structure is very light, so I would like to keep it this way for now and then, maybe in a year’s time, decide how to move forward.’

All jewellery by Ilaria Icardi

This article appears in the Wallpaper* March Style 2026 issue, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

All change! It could serve as a mantra for the world right now, but, for the March 2026 Style Issue, we use it to describe the season’s unprecedented reordering of fashion’s high command. The S/S 2026 collections saw debuts by no fewer than 15 creative directors, giving our fashion team cause to focus on the idea of the ‘clean slate’. To this end, we profile two designers on their bold new starts: Glenn Martens, who takes over at Maison Margiela, one of fashion’s most influential houses; and Duran Lantink, whose boundary-pushing debut show for Jean Paul Gaultier in Paris had everybody talking.

Fresh chapters abound in other corners. We take a trip to Seoul to check out Wooyoungmi’s monolithic new flagship store as the Korean label enters a new phase; head to the Swiss Alps, where Hauser & Wirth’s hospitality arm Artfarm is breathing new life into a 16th-century guest house; and meet Ilaria Icardi, Prada’s womenswear design director, who recently launched an eponymous jewellery line.

For our regular digest of the season’s trends, The Glossary, we question what, in our current culture of short attention spans, does ‘newness’ look like? And ahead of a new show launching at MoMu Antwerp, we explore the legacy of the Antwerp Six, a group of radical Belgian designers who changed the global fashion landscape in the 1980s and 1990s.

Elsewhere, we explore the ‘unnatural natural’ new face arising from our Botox and filler fatigue, and highlight the fresh slant on men’s tailoring and womenswear that designers have been taking this season.

Finally, our resident design critic Hugo Macdonald administers a timely blast of fresh thinking to the tired old task of spring cleaning: a balm, he suggests, for both body and soul.

Bill Prince
Editor-in-Chief

The March 2026 Style Issue of Wallpaper* is available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 5 February 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

‘A new elegance’ is how Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons described their S/S 2026 Prada womenswear collection, seeking to liberate clothing from its ‘hierarchies’ by shuffling up everyday uniforms – a longtime touch point for the house – with opulent eveningwear, often in the same look.

‘This collection is about reacting to the uncertain – clothes that can shift, change, adapt,’ said Miuccia Prada after the show, held in the sparse Deposito showspace at Fondazione Prada this past October in Milan, the floor flooded with orange-hued lacquer.

Wallpaper Design Awards: these Prada sunglasses are our ‘Best Sartorial Shapeshifter’

A series of clever accessories captured this hybrid, shapeshifting mood, from simple drawstring pouches – like those used to store shoes – rendered in lustrous colourful satin, or kitten-heeled pumps mashed up with the simple elastic plimsolls once worn in PE classes. Though perhaps most striking – and a worthy Wallpaper* Design Award winner – are these glasses, whereby uniform-issue metal-framed opticals are adorned with a surreal bejewelled flourish on their temple tips. As such, they are eyewear and jewellery in one.

‘We started from a sense of freedom,’ says Simons of the collection. ‘There is the license to combine different elements, to compose. [But] there is also a physical liberation, moving away from fashion as a sculptural imposition on the body of a woman. We shifted into the opposite – physical emancipation, but also freedom as a state of mind… Uniform is part of a Prada history – for us, there is the idea that a woman can be beautiful, elegant and strong in a uniform. It is a challenge, to a hierarchy of perception. To free women from this.’

READ: In Milan, Prada seeks freedom as a ‘response to the overload of contemporary culture’

Discover all the Wallpaper* Design Awards 2026 winners in the February issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News + from 8 January 2025. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Despite a lean show schedule – largely down to the number of Italian brands choosing to go co-ed in recent seasons, including Gucci and Fendi – Milan Fashion Week Men’s A/W 2026 edition provided a nonetheless intriguing line-up of runway shows, from those that asked the big questions (at Prada, in ‘uncomfortable’ times, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons asked what do we take from the past, and what do we leave behind) to those that revelled in the joy of dressing (Ralph Lauren’s return to the Milan runway for the first time in 20 years was one such show). Others introduced fresh perspectives: in his second on-schedule show for his brand Setchu, 2023 LVMH Prize winner Satoshi Kuwata – a Kyoto-born designer who lives and works in Milan – was a rare representative for emerging talent at the week (typically Milan has been dominated by its blockbuster names).

Here, Wallpaper* selects the standout shows of Milan Fashion Week Men’s, which we saw runway-side as they happened (also see our Milan live blog, where we recorded all the action as it unfolded).

Zegna

Themes of inheritance are prescient at Zegna: on 1 January Edoardo and Angelo Zegna, fourth-generation members of the textile dynasty, became co-CEOs of the house founded by their great-grandfather, Ermenegildo Zegna, over a century ago (they succeeded their father, Gildo Zegna, who will become executive chairman). For his latest show – a return to Milan after showing last season in Dubai – creative director Alessandro Sartori mined similar themes, transforming Milan’s Palazzo Del Ghiaccio into a vast dressing room, complete with a series of towering closets, each filled with pieces from the real-life wardrobes of Gildo and his cousin Paolo Zegna. They spanned the personal and the inherited: an impromptu history of the house through the clothing of its protagonists. Sartori said he was fascinated by the idea of a garment as a vessel for memories; of creating clothing that is built to last and passed through generations. ‘I am after the sense of wonder that happens when one finds a piece that was owned by one's father, grandfather, uncle; the discovery that comes from studying other ways of dressing, which prompts a willingness to try something new,’ he said.

As the show began, models wove their way in and out of the wardrobes, Narnia-style; their own looks, which had a nostalgic elegance, captured a mood of ease and eclecticism as if they were picking out garments as they went. Indeed, Sartori described the look as dégagé: silhouettes were cut with his eye for generous, contemporary proportions, while a rich melange of fabrics spanned heritage tweeds, Shetland wools and a mohair gabardine in classic hues of brown, anthracite grey and black (shots of sapphire and mustard enlivened the look). Like last autumn/winter, outerwear was a true highlight: boxy overcoats took on roomy silhouettes with clever double-breasted fastenings (buttons were reduced into a line of three, held in place by the middle button), while utility jackets in suede had a 1970s flavour, as if plucked from one of Sartori’s time-travelling wardrobes. ‘We take deep pride and make a lot of effort in doing what we do,’ he said. ‘So the idea of creating something that can be kept, reused and reinterpreted for a long time energises us.’

Paul Smith

In the collection notes, Paul Smith name-checked his new head of men’s design, Sam Cotton, whom the stalwart British designer credited with helping him see his archive through ‘fresh eyes’. That archive is physical: a vast storage facility in Smith’s native Nottingham, comprising over 5,000 pieces, collected by the designer over the near-half century since he opened his first shop in 1970. ‘The joy of having the archive like this is that my own design team visits regularly and comes back with great enthusiasm for things they found there,’ Smith said in a voiceover to the salon-style A/W 2026 show, held in his Milanese headquarters on Saturday afternoon. ‘Seeing it through their eyes gives me energy, makes me see things in a new way.’

As such, tropes from the archive reemerged, like a series of ‘inside-out’ tailoring from the late 1990s, an era towards which that Smith and his design team had been drawn back. There were also elements from the 1980s, too – broad-shouldered tailoring recalled corporate attire of the era, while a riff on the tricorne hat had a New Romantics feel. Botanic prints, hanging glass bag charms and ‘bookish’ glasses added to the eclectic mood of the collection – Smith said another inspiration was French artist and filmmaker Jean Cocteau. As Smith, who turns 80 this year, bounded down the stairs to take his final bow, there was a celebratory mood: in the post-show chatter, there was a broad consensus that this was his best show in some time.

Setchu

For his A/W 2026 show, Setchu’s Satoshi Kuwata invited guests into his new Milan studio, a light-filled space which, for the occasion, had been lined with tatami sleeping mats. Though he now lives and works in Milan, Kuwata’s native Japan (the 2023 LVMH Prize-winning designer was born in Kyoto) remains prescient in his work; here, it emerged in woven straw sliders and booties (recalling both the tatami mats and traditional woven baskets), as well as the often unconventional cut of his garments, something now synonymous with contemporary Japanese fashion design.

This season, for Kuwata, as he elaborated in a charming introduction to the collection (the designer appeared on the runway personally to introduce its themes), had begun with fishing – his favourite pastime. Particularly, a recent trip to the barren landscapes of Greenland, a stormy mecca for fishing aficionados, who travel to its plentiful (if dangerous) waters. As such, garments had a feeling of function and protection (albeit in often unconventional style), from bags that, via a series of zips, transformed into garments to cocooning outerwear (jackets looped over the head and were curved at the sleeve) and flourishes of fluffy white ‘fur’ that loosely drew on historic garments in the Greenland National Museum in Nuuk (he likened them to those of the Ainu shamans of northern Japan in their use of natural materials to protect against the elements).

Now in his third season showing on the runway – the first show took place at Pitti Uomo, the second in Milan last season – Kuwata is bringing fresh energy to Milan Fashion Week Men’s, which has been notorious for its lack of emerging talent (the city’s banner names have long dominated). Judging by the buoyant mood in the room afterwards, he is a much-appreciated new fixture.

Prada

At Prada, co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons said that they were looking back to the past to look forward to the future with an A/W 2026 menswear collection that was about ‘evolution not erasure’. Backstage, Simons likened it to a kind of ‘archaeology’. ‘There is a lot here from the past,’ he said. ‘If you take the layers away, you always find a kind of beauty. There’s the knowledge that you still want to celebrate and use, but you also want to innovate.’ Befitting the collection’s thematics, the show took place amid an OMA-designed set that looked as if an Italian palazzo had been sliced away through its floors – whether in the midst of its destruction or renovation.

Mrs Prada and Simons looked towards menswear archetypes – among them the businessman’s shirt, the raincoat and the double-breasted suit – skewing their proportions until they became something new. Cuffs of shirts became supersized, layered under ultra-narrow double-breasted tailoring and overcoats, while mackintosh-style jackets came with colourful overlays and matching sou’wester hats. ‘It’s a moment of really big change,’ said Mrs Prada, who was keen to note the ‘uncomfortable’ political climate that backdropped the show. ‘Who knows the future? So [you have to think about] what you want to keep. What can you transform?’

‘Think about the businessman's or the politician’s shirt in this moment,’ added Simons. ‘You can transform that in two steps, in three steps, in four steps – what if you made the stripes horizontal? What if you gave it a T-shirt neckline? What if you age it? It’s about transforming things that you respect and love. Maybe they have the wrong connotation at a certain moment of time, when we don’t want that American corporate, masculine power. But what if you make it young, make it in beautiful colours?’

Read our full review of the Prada show here.

Giorgio Armani

Having eschewed the usual Emporio Armani show on Saturday evening (the menswear is expected to be shown alongside the womenswear collection in February), the house hosted its A/W 2026 Giorgio Armani show on the closing day of Milan Fashion Week Men’s. A starry crowd gathered for the occasion (including Heated Rivalry’s Hudson Williams, who earlier in the week walked for DSquared2 in a much-Instagrammed moment). It marked the first menswear show since the death of Mr Armani this past September, and the solo debut of Leo Dell'Orco, the longtime head of the men's style office of the Armani Group (as the designer’s right-hand man, he worked with Mr Armani on the menswear house’s collections; as it stands, the future creative directorship of Giorgio Armani remains unknown).

This was a collection of evolution, not revolution: a respectful continuation of Mr Armani’s legacy of louche elegance, from lustrous collarless silk suiting (the house said ‘cangiante’, an irridescent silk, was a ‘metaphor’ for the collection – ‘something in constant transformation... catching the light in ever new ways’) to oversized trench coats and fluid tuxedos, the last studded with glimmering crystal brooches. There were also some great pieces in leather – the tie-waisted flight jacket worn by Kit Butler, cut to the roomy proportions of Mr Armani’s 1980s oeuvre, shows how contemporary (and indeed borrowed), the designer’s archive still feels. As ever with Armani shows, the reception was rapturous: all the more so when a visibly emotional Dell'Orco took his final bow.

Ralph Lauren

The Ralph Lauren show marked the brand's first in Milan for two decades, with the eponymous designer opting for an intimate salon-style presentation in Palazzo Ralph Lauren (a Mino Fiocchi-designed villa that the brand acquired in the 1990s) over a more blockbuster happening. It worked: his Polo Ralph Lauren and Ralph Lauren Purple Label presentations were shown back to back, and there was a charm to seeing the clothes up close and in motion, an optimistic offering that mined the designer’s hallmarks – from the preppy uniform of Polo Ralph Lauren (an aesthetic being readily embraced by a new generation of fans, as well as here at fashion week) to on-the-ranch Americana, old Hollywood eveningwear and plenty of brilliant denim (Lauren’s patched-up and repaired jeans are also having a street style comeback)

Styled eclectically – often these tropes were mashed up into a single look – Lauren said the collection itself was ‘inspired by the different ways men live’ (a message from the 87-year-old designer, who did not travel for the show, was placed on attendees’ seats). At over 70 looks – closed out by Tyson Beckford in a shaggy-pile coat, tuxedo, cowboy hat and hiking boots – there was, simply put, something for everyone. But what united the broad collection was a certain Ralphness that makes these much-reinterpreted archetypes distinct. ‘When I began designing menswear, I was drawn to the timeless elements of tradition, but I was never bound by it,’ he said. In this welcome return to the runway, it’s clear this attitude lives on.

Raf Simons likened his and Miuccia Prada’s latest menswear collection to a kind of ‘archaeology’. ‘There is a lot here from the past,’ he said backstage. ‘If you take the layers away, you always find a kind of beauty. There’s the knowledge that you still want to celebrate and use, but you also want to innovate.’

The show took place in Fondazione Prada’s hangar-like Deposito space, which this season had been transformed by OMA into the ruins of an Italian palazzo. Though there was no dust or rubble; instead, it was as if the various floors had been neatly cut away to reveal a cross-section of the rooms inside (in typical Prada style, they were painted in pastel shades and were installed with wood-panelling and marble fireplaces, suspended at height around the room). Only the jagged remains of ceiling beams and floorboards were evidence of any destruction having happened before.

Prada A/W 2026 menswear: ‘What should remain from the past?’

Perhaps, then, this was a collection not of archaeology but of renovation: to make something that exists new, what do you keep, and what do you strip away? Or, as Simons elaborated: ‘We questioned what should remain, from the past – and what can you build, from what you learn?’ For the A/W 2026 collection, this meant a series of archetypal pieces skewed in proportion and intriguingly layered: the formal shirt (here, cuffs were blown up in size and emerged from the skinny sleeves of narrow overcoats), the double-breasted suit (like the outerwear, tailoring was ultra-narrow in construction), or the mackintosh jacket (raincoats came with vivid overlays across the shoulders and jaunty matching sou’wester hats).

‘It’s a moment of really big change,’ said Mrs Prada, noting the ‘uncomfortable’ political climate which backdrops the show. ‘Who knows the future? So [you have to think about] what you want to keep. What can you transform?’

‘Think about the businessman, or the politician’s, shirt in this moment,’ added Simons. ‘You can transform that in two steps, in three steps, in four steps – what if you made the stripes horizontal? What is you gave it a T-shirt neckline? What if you age it? It’s about transforming things that you respect and love. Maybe they have the wrong connotation at a certain moment of time, when we don’t want that American corporate, masculine power. But what if you make it young, make it in beautiful colours?’

Other elements were treated to appear as if already worn: shirt cuffs were gently stained and soiled, leather outerwear was creased and crumpled across its surface, while another fabric was peeled away in patches to reveal houndstooth beneath, like removing a layer of wallpaper. Prints had a similar feel: ‘they are collages of a lot of different things, Delft tiles, landscapes, broken finds from Egypt and Greece,’ said Simons. Meanwhile, smaller details – colourful laces on footwear, wallets stuffed into too-small back pockets, tie-fastening belts – suggested moments of personal expression and style.

But there were no easy answers here: Prada has long abandoned tidy thematics or easy explanations – across Miuccia Prada’s career, she has preferred the clothing to speak for itself (and, indeed, set those watching her runway shows the challenge of thinking for themselves). ‘I have always liked that from the very start, Miuccia’s work has been about challenging, questioning and investigating. That idea inspires, that reference to a tradition of Prada,’ said Simons.

‘[The role of the designer] is to be uncomfortable,’ she added. ‘To be honest, to do my job seriously, to try and make the best possible. I stay intellectually honest by saying that we have to do our job the best we can, to bring creativity, understanding. This is our profession: going out and working, searching, respecting.’ And if it takes digging up the floorboards to find answers? Well, that’s just the Prada way.

prada.com

Welcome to Milan Fashion Week Men’s A/W 2026

As Pitti Uomo culminates in Florence (catch up on our highlights from the menswear fair here), eyes turn towards Italy’s capital of style, Milan, where the A/W 2026 edition of Milan Fashion Week Men’s takes place this weekend (16-19 January 2026). There is something of a back-to-school feel to the event: the four-day happening marks – bar a handful of guest designers at Pitti Uomo, including Hed Mayner – the first runway shows of the A/W 2026 season, which will continue after Milan in Paris, later this month (after that, the A/W 2026 womenswear season will begin in February, in New York).

As ever, the Wallpaper* style editors are on the ground: despite a relatively sedate schedule, there are still a number of notable runway shows happening across the weekend, including Prada (expect a transporting OMA-designed set and a runway show that will no doubt set the tone for the season ahead), Dolce & Gabbana, Zegna and Giorgio Armani (the last marks the first menswear show since the eponymous designer’s passing last year). Elsewhere, British designer Paul Smith will also host his A/W 2026 show in Milan, following his move to the city last season, while Ralph Lauren will make its menswear runway return to Milan, having last shown here 20 years prior. Numerous presentations and events – including Ferragamo’s celebration of its ‘Tramezza’ shoes on Sunday evening – will take place alongside the main shows.

Here, follow our real-time look at Milan Fashion Week Men’s A/W 2026 – from behind-the-scenes glimpses to access to the shows, presentations and parties – as seen through the eyes (and iPhones) of the Wallpaper* editors. Stay tuned.

Zegna opens Milan Fashion Week Men’s by delving into the ‘family closet’

And so it begins – the first looks of Milan Fashion Week Men’s came from Zegna this afternoon, where Alessandro Sartori made his return to the Italian style capital after showing his S/S 2026 collection in Dubai last season (the house also moved from its traditional spot closing the week to opening it). The setting was Palazzo Del Ghiaccio, whereby the expansive main hall had been transformed with a series of towering ‘imaginary closets’ which were nonetheless filled with real clothing sourced by Sartori from Gildo and Paolo Zegna, both third-generation members of the Zegna family (Gildo is the house’s Group Executive Chairman).

Inherited through the family line, they inspired a collection of eclectic, nostalgic elegance – nonetheless cut to Sartori’s generous, contemporary silhouette. ‘I am after the sense of wonder that happens when one finds a piece that was owned by one's father, grandfather, uncle; the discovery that comes from studying other ways of dressing, which prompts a willingness to try something new,’ said Sartori. ‘The idea of creating something that can be kept energises us.’ The casting was equally cross-generational – an age-diverse casting that has become Sartori’s signature in recent seasons.

Ralph Lauren returns to the Milan runway after 20 years

Ralph Lauren opened the doors to his eponymous Milanese palazzo this evening, hosting an intimate presentation of his A/W 2026 menswear collections in the striking Mino Fiocchi-designed building that the brand acquired in the 1990s. Moving away from the usual static presentation format, Lauren instead chose to show his latest Polo Ralph Lauren and Ralph Lauren Purple collections for men in a back-to-back runway show that marked his first catwalk show in the city for two decades.

He said that the A/W 2026 collection itself was ‘inspired by the different ways men live’, eschewing tight thematics for a broad collection which married his distinct style tropes – from the preppy uniform for which he is best known (here: houndstooth jackets, yellow cable knits, Polo-branded caps and the like) to on-the-ranch Americana and old Hollywood eveningwear. As ever, it felt impossible not to be seduced by his optimistic vision. ‘[These collections] stand for the worlds I have believed in and lived,’ he said. JM

Jacob Cohën opens a one-night-only hotel

The dramatic Luigi Perrone-designed Circolo Filologico Milanese was momentarily transformed last night into a for-one-night-only Jacob Cohën hotel to present the brand’s A/W 2026 collection (an undertaking only a little less ambitious than last season, where owner and creative director Jennifer Tommasi Bardelle created a whole Jacob Cohën village). Cue Jacob Cohën bell boys who led guests through to the ‘lobby’, where models lounged on Chesterfield sofas while a jazz band provided a live soundtrack (champagne, naturally, was on tap). Upstairs, there was a chance to see the highlights up close: highlights included the super-lightweight suedes in Jacob Cohën’s signature denim blue, some lined with fluffy shearling for warmth. JM

Simon Holloway looks to Lord Snowdon’s personal wardrobe to inspire his A/W 2026 collection for Dunhill

This season, Simon Holloway chose to show his A/W 2026 collection for British heritage house Dunhill at Villa Mozart, one of Milan’s discreet architectural gems (the Piero Portaluppi​-designed villa is recognisable for its ivy-covered exterior). A shift away from the runway presentations of recent seasons, Holloway instead hosted a series of intimate talk-throughs for press, introducing a collection which was inspired by the insouciant style of Antony Armstrong-Jones, Lord Snowdon. For Holloway, the British photographer – who married Princess Margaret in 1960 to become the Earl of Snowdon – encapsulated the mood of the heady decade which followed, where high society mingled with rockstars, and the stuffy dress codes of the 1950s were abandoned (American photographer Ethan James Green sought to capture the era in an accompanying photo series, starring artist and model Henry Kitcher).

‘[It’s about] the tension between aristocratic formality and unguarded artistic expression,’ said Holloway of the collection, which came largely in shades of grey (it is an ‘always favourite’ he told Wallpaper* of the hue at the preview this morning). Bolder flourishes came in ‘haberdashery’, like colourful silk pocket squares and cashmere scarves, while motifs drawn from Arts & Crafts textiles adorned jacquard tailoring and slippers. Indeed superlative fabrications were the order of the day: from fluffy alpaca and hand-finished double-faced wool to soft-to-the-touch suede, which was used to construct a (very desirable) pair of ‘jeans’.

A fishing trip to Greenland inspired Satoshi Kuwata’s latest Setchu collection

For his sophomore Milan show, Kyoto-born designer Satoshi Kuwata – winner of the 2023 LVMH Prize for his 2020-founded brand Setchu – welcomed guests into his new brand’s ‘home’, a light-filled studio on Via Privata Rezia (for the occasion, the space had been lined with tatami mats, traditionally used for sleeping in his native Japan). Ever hospitable, Kuwata appeared at the start of the show to welcome guests, going on to talk through the collection’s inspirations, which included a memorable fishing trip to Greenland (fishing is one of Kuwata’s favourite pastimes; Greenland’s waters offered plentiful supplies). It led to a series of intriguing garments which married outdoorsy function (bags that transformed into garments through clever zip placement, warm layers of quilting, enveloping bombers and the like) with his signature unconventional pattern-cutting, honed by the designer during his time on Savile Row. Playful flourishes – like booties and slides made woven from straw, or shaggy, yeti-like ‘furs’ – added to the uplifting mood. ‘It just makes you happy,’ said my seatmate. JM.

Dolce & Gabbana was about the multiplicity of man

This season, Stefano Gabbana and Domenico Dolce moved away from the singular themes of past collections (for S/S 2026, it was ‘pyjama dressing’) towards a more wide-ranging ‘portrait’ of style that sought to capture the multiplicity of man. ‘The runway becomes a contemporary gallery of living portraits, where every look functions as a psychological and sartorial self-portrait,’ said a booming voiceover at the start of the show. ‘[It] unfolds through a sequence of micro universes, each representing a distinct portrait of man – the introspective thinker, the creative visionary, the Mediterranean sensualist and the restless romantic’. As such, an eclectic mode of dressing was the order of the day, shifting between the bold (an enormous striped shaggy ‘fur’ coat which opened the show; colourful jumpers in fuzzy mohair), the bookish (thick-rimmed glasses, jackets in heritage fabrications), and the sporty (a handful of models in walked the runway in a Dolce & Gabbana-branded football kit). And – in a nod to last season – a pair of pyjamas and a leopard print robe. ‘There are infinite possibilities. Each one deserves its portrait,’ the voiceover concluded. JM

Paul Smith looks back into the archive for his latest Milan show

For the second season running, Paul Smith chose to show in his Milan headquarters – an ‘intimate, salon-style’ presentation narrated by the designer via voiceover. ‘[It’s about] putting classics together in a way that’s a bit irreverent and odd, sometimes playful,’ he said, noting that several of the designs were rooted in pieces his design team had discovered in his expansive Nottingham archive (it numbers over 5000 pieces of clothing and ephemera, collected over the course of Smith’s career). The 1980s and 1990s were particular touch points: some memorable inside-out tailoring was revisited, while other blazers recalled the wide-shouldered, double-breasted silhouette of the 1980s (albeit in louche, contemporary style). Meanwhile, playful flourishes – from hanging glass bag charms and botanic motifs to a jaunty riff on the tricorne hat – captured an artistic sensibility, which Smith said was inspired by Jean Cocteau. Consensus in the room was that this was the designer’s best collection in some time. JM

Stone Island presents its latest ‘Prototype Research_Series’

It is well-known that Stone Island has an avid, cult-like following, a group of technical-wear obsessives who devote their time to establishing comprehensive collections of rare and limited-edition garments. The ‘Prototype Research_Series’ is one such project – an annual initiative which showcases the spoils of the brand’s latest Wonka-like experiments in textile manufacturing, for which they remain best known (we took a trip to their extraordinary research lab in Ravarino, Italy last year, to find out more). For its ninth edition – presented in an immersive installation in Stone Island’s Milan headquarters last night – the technology in question was an ’air-blown lamination knit’, a 3D process which uses hot air to bond a membrane onto the chenille knit using an inflatable mannequin (doing it onto the ‘body’ in this way ensures perfect adhesion, according to the brand). 100 colourful pieces have been made in total – the race is no doubt on as to who can add it to their collection first. JM

A first look at the show set for Prada’s A/W 2026 menswear show

A first look at the OMA-conceived set for Prada’s A/W 2026 menswear show, taking place in Fondazione Prada this afternoon in Milan. Transforming the hangar-like Deposito space – where Prada traditionally holds its shows – the pastel-coloured set is a cross-section of a traditional Italian villa or palazzo, as if sliced through its floors. It comes complete with wood-panelled doors and fireplaces in differing marble hues.

Prada’s A/W 2026 menswear collection was about ‘evolution not erasure’

‘What can we build, from what we have learned?’ asked Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons at their A/W 2026 Prada menswear show this afternoon, which took menswear hallmarks – from cuffed shirts to double-breasted tailoring – and reimagined them in renewed proportions.

Presented in Fondazione Prada’s Deposito space – which appeared as if an Italian palazzo had been sliced away through its floors in a show set by OMA – the designers elaborated that this was a collection about ‘evolution not erasure’. ‘There is a sense of the before, which interests us, even as we search for the new,’ said Miuccia Prada. ‘That is a sign of respect – you want to move on but not erase what came before. Holding an idea of beauty and changing it into something new.’

‘We wanted to focus on important things, beautiful things that feel familiar but can be reconsidered,’ Simons added. ‘I have always liked that from the very start Miuccia’s work has been about challenging, questioning and investigating. [Here], we questioned what should remain, from the past – and what can you build, from what you learn?’

Read our full report on Prada’s A/W 2026 menswear show: ‘It’s a kind of archaeology’

Raf Simons likened his and Miuccia Prada’s latest menswear collection to a kind of ‘archaeology’. ‘There is a lot here from the past,’ he said backstage. ‘If you take the layers away, you always find a kind of beauty. There’s the knowledge that you still want to celebrate and use, but you also want to innovate.’

The show took place in Fondazione Prada’s hangar-like Deposito space, which this season had been transformed by OMA into the ruins of an Italian palazzo. Though there was no dust or rubble; instead, it was as if the various floors had been neatly cut away to reveal a cross-section of the rooms inside (in typical Prada style, they were painted in pastel shades and were installed with wood-panelling and marble fireplaces, suspended at height around the room). Only the jagged remains of ceiling beams and floorboards were evidence of any destruction having happened before.

Perhaps, then, this was a collection not of archaeology but of renovation: to make something that exists new, what do you keep, and what do you strip away? Or, as Simons elaborated: ‘We questioned what should remain, from the past – and what can you build, from what you learn?’

Continue reading our A/W 2026 Prada menswear show report.

Tod’s takes over Villa Necchi to present its latest menswear collection

For its latest menswear presentation, Tod’s once again took over Villa Necchi, the Piero Portaluppi-designed home on Via Mozart that is perhaps best known as the setting for Luca Guadagnino’s I Am Love. The house’s latest menswear collection was scattered across the villa’s ground floor, with the Gommino – its signature driving shoe – continuing to take centre stage. This season, it was the ‘Winter Gommino’, a heftier version of the style which also comes in a lace-up boot iteration (for A/W 2026, they had fluffy shearling or cashmere linings). For ready-to-wear, leather was central: a new ’Pashmy’ leather – named after the pashmina as a nod to its softness and lightness – was used to coach jackets and patch-pocket blazers. JM

Giorgio Armani holds first menswear show since the death of the eponymous designer

This morning, guests gathered at the Palazzo Orsini headquarters of Giorgio Armani on Milan‘s Via Borgonuovo for what would be the first menswear show since the death of the eponymous designer last September. What followed was a respectful continuation of the Armani’s singular aesthetic: namely, louche, unrestricted silhouettes and a rich melange of fabrics. This season, the nexus was ‘cangiante’, an irridescent silk, that here became a ‘metaphor’ for the collection – ‘something in constant transformation... catching the light in ever new ways’. The show would mark the debut of Leo Dell'Orco, head of the men's style office of the Armani Group and Mr Armani’s right-hand man, who took an emotional bow at the show’s close. JM

On 14 January, the first runway shows of the A/W 2026 menswear season take place at Florence’s Pitti Uomo, heralding the start of a fashion month that will also make stops in Milan and Paris in the coming weeks (the menswear fair’s guest designers Shinayakozuka and Hed Mayner both show on Pitti Uomo’s first evening). While the schedule is certainly quieter than the blockbuster womenswear shows in September – over 15 creative directors made their debuts at fashion’s major houses across the season – there will still be plenty of notable moments, including Jonathan Anderson’s sophomore menswear collection for Dior (it will be intriguing to see him hone his vision now he’s settled) and the swan song of Véronique Nichanian, artistic director of Hermès’ men’s universe, who is leaving after a near-four-decade-long tenure.

In anticipation, ahead of the season’s start this evening, we asked the Wallpaper* style teams about the moments they are looking forward to this Men’s Fashion Month.

‘There will be plenty of standout moments across fashion month: I’m always excited to see what’s next at Prada, and Jonathan Anderson’s sophomore menswear show for Dior will no doubt be a highlight (it’s been exciting seeing his first collection end up in stores this month). But this season I’m going to relish the quieter moments, too: like Setchu in Milan, where Satoshi Kuwata – who is based locally but was born in Kyoto, Japan – will hold his second runway show on the city’s fashion schedule. His considered approach, which melds a background on Savile Row with design flourishes drawn from his native Japan, always makes for an intriguing show. As an aside, I loved his first-ever fragrances, launched late last year: named after times of the day, they reimagine his personal rituals as scents, from morning ‘genmaicha’ green tea to ‘Friday 2AM Tatami’, inspired by the scent of Japanese sleeping mats. I’ll be sure to be wearing mine on show day.’

‘After the near-overwhelming number of debuts at womenswear this past September, I am relishing the relative calm of menswear: the somewhat reduced schedule, particularly in Milan, means there is more time to digest what we are seeing (the various appointments and presentations also allow an opportunity to view things up close). As for the highlights, in Milan it will always be Prada: for me, there's not quite another show like it – the clarity of vision that Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons have honed across their partnership has led to collections which again and again set the tone for the season ahead (and, thanks to OMA’s always-transporting show sets, they come with plenty of spectacle).

‘In Paris, I look forward – like Jason – to Jonathan Anderson’s second menswear show for Dior, which promises even more theatre, though I am also excited to see the latest offerings from Willy Chavarria (the American designer will continue to show in Paris this season), Kiko Kostadinov, IM Men and Rick Owens, all showing across the week. There will be a poignant goodbye, too: on Saturday (17 January), Véronique Nichanian, artistic director of Hermès’ men’s universe, will step away from her role after almost four decades (I spent a memorable day in Paris interviewing her for the March 2023 Style Issue of Wallpaper*). Shifting the show to the evening spot, it will be a no-doubt fitting send-off for a record-breaking career (she is the longest-serving creative director of a fashion house) defined by both critical and commercial success. We’ll be raising a glass.’

‘This men’s season I’m most excited for Pitti Uomo, which I’m attending for Wallpaper* for the very first time. Kicking off fashion month, the biannual menswear fair is staged within Florence’s stately 14th-century Fortezza da Basso, where countless brands – including Herno, Caruso and Brunello Cucinelli – will present their collections. The latter hosted its famous dinner last night, and I was excited to witness the decadent spread first-hand.

‘As for the shows, Paris-based Hed Mayner is in the spotlight with the headline guest designer slot, staging his presentation in a midcentury building close to Santa Maria Novella station on Wednesday evening. His show will be followed by two rising Japanese talents: Shinya Kozuka, known for his painterly collections, and Soshi Otsuki, the winner of the LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers in 2025. A strong Japanese presence at the fair continues through tangential events during the week, including the first official Sebiro Sanpo (suit walk) in Italy organised with fabric mill Vitale Barberis Canonico. The event originates in Tokyo, a financial hub and home to Japan’s “salarymen”, and sees hundreds of suit lovers gather to walk the streets in their finest tailoring.

‘As for the rest of the men’s shows, I’m always excited to see what Raf Simons and Miuccia Prada have been dreaming up together. Their show takes place on Sunday (18 January) in Milan in the vast Deposito building adjoining the brand’s namesake foundation in Milan – a space they’ll no doubt transform once again into another surprising, imaginative world.’

‘The menswear shows typically have less striking beauty moments than their womenswear counterparts – bar a slew of more avant-garde designers, from Rick Owens to Junya Watanabe, which will hopefully lend some intrigue – though the fresh and clean complexions that will likely be seen on the majority of runways feel fitting for the early weeks of the year (Prada, Dries Van Noten and Hermès always do this well, drawing from their own beauty lines). As someone who wears plenty of menswear, I'll be looking at the fashion, too: Dries Van Noten is a favourite (I loved Julian Klausner’s first menswear show last season, and I’m sure this one will strike a similar balance of the romantic and real), while Kiko Kostadinov is always interesting – after a brilliant co-ed show off-schedule at his London studio late last year (inspired by his dog, Dante), I’m excited to see what he has in store.’

With barely a moment for the dust to settle on 2025, a year dubbed by commentators as ‘fashion’s big reset’ (look back on Wallpaper’s 25 fashion moments of 2025 to see why), the cycle begins once again this January with the arrival of the A/W 2026 edition of Men’s Fashion Week. As ever, this will include stops in Florence for Pitti Uomo, the historic menswear trade fair which happens twice-yearly, Milan and Paris, the latter providing the bulk of this season’s schedule.

Though notably quieter than Women’s Fashion Week, which begins next month in New York, there will still be a number of intriguing moments to look out for – not least Jonathan Anderson’s sophomore menswear collection for Dior, after debuting at the house last June. With numerous big-name houses sitting out the men’s schedule this season – including Loewe, Balenciaga and Lanvin – it will likely prove the standout show of the week. Elsewhere in Paris, Véronique Nichanian will hold her swansong show for Hermès – a no-doubt heartfelt affair which will celebrate a record-breaking 37-year tenure defined by both commercial and critical success.

From this season’s roster of Pitti Uomo guest designers to Paul Smith’s return to Milan, we look forward to the imminent Men’s Fashion Week A/W 2026 and the schedule’s defining moments.

Pitti Uomo (13–16 January 2025)

Historic menswear fair Pitti Uomo, which centres around Florence’s 14th-century Fortezza da Basso – as well as a handful of dramatic locations across the Cradle of the Renaissance – takes place twice-yearly, coinciding with Men’s Fashion Month (generally, attendees take the train from Florence to Milan after its conclusion, where the month continues). Alongside the main fair – which will see showcases from Brunello Cucinelli, Piacenza 1773 and Caruso, among others – are a handful of guest designers, which this season are headlined by Hed Mayner, who will show his A/W 2026 collection at the event (previous guest designers have included Raf Simons, Grace Wales Bonner and Martine Rose, among others).

Mayner, who shows each season in Paris and is known for his inventive riffs on wardrobe staples, says he is ‘excited to show [his] work in such an amazingly rich and historical city like Florence... This new context will encourage me to try new things.’ He will show in the Palazzina Reale di Santa Maria Novella, an imposing modernist building in the same complex as Santa Maria Novella station. He will be joined by fellow guest designer Soshi Otsuki, who hails from Japan and won the 2025 LVMH Prize for Young Fashion Designers. He has chosen the refectory of Santa Maria Novella church for the occasion, expressing his ‘deep honour’ to be chosen as one of the season’s guest designers.

Milan Fashion Week Men’s (16–19 January 2025)

On Friday 16 January, eyes will turn to Milan, where the Italian style capital will host the latest edition of Milan Fashion Week Men’s. Despite a somewhat scant schedule – certainly in comparison to Paris – there remains a handful of shows which will no doubt define the season ahead. Most notably, Prada, where Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons will show their latest collection on Sunday afternoon (the house’s highly influential collections often will set the tone for the upcoming month of shows, and beyond). Zegna, meanwhile, will switch from closing proceedings to opening them – the house will now show at 3pm on Friday 16 January – while Ralph Lauren will make his return to the Milan runway with a menswear presentation that same evening. Paul Smith is also returning to Milan after showing in the city last season; he joins a raft of the city’s mainstays, including Dolce & Gabbana, DSquared2 and Giorgio Armani, the latter hosting the first menswear show since the death of the house’s eponymous founder last September. Emporio Armani, meanwhile, will sit this menswear season out.

Paris Fashion Week Men’s (20–25 January 2025)

Making up the bulk of the schedule is Paris Fashion Week Men’s, which will begin with a no-doubt blockbuster show from Pharrell Williams at Louis Vuitton on January 20 and run all the way until the evening of January 25 (Jacquemus will close the month on Sunday night). Standout moments include a much-anticipated sophomore men’s collection from Jonathan Anderson at Dior – his first show last summer was critically lauded, and arrived in stores earlier this January – while Véronique Nichanian will bow out after a 37-year tenure at Hermès. She will hold a final show on the evening of Saturday 24 January, before her successor, British designer Grace Wales Bonner, takes over the Parisian house’s menswear collections later this year. New to the schedule this season is underground Bologna-based label Magliano (the brand usually shows in Milan), joining a roster of major names including Rick Owens, Comme des Garçons, Dries Van Noten, Issey Miyake and Sacai. Meanwhile, Willy Chavarria – one of the Wallpaper* USA 400 for 2025 – will continue to show in Paris this season, the third season showing away from his native New York.

2025 was a year of seismic change in the fashion industry – one not unnoticed by the Wallpaper* style team, who, in reflecting on their personal style moments of the year, found joy in the new. There was Matthieu Blazy’s exuberant debut at Chanel; the ‘clarity’ of Jonathan Anderson’s first womenswear collection for Dior; and the ‘fresh and beautiful’ opening act from Simone Bellotti at Jil Sander.

But there was charm to be found in the existing, too: Craig Green’s ‘delirious, psychedelic’ return to the runway in Paris, or Nadège Vanhée’s ‘Second Chapter’ show for Hermès in Shanghai, which unfolded against the city’s futuristic skyline. ‘It made for an arresting spectacle,’ says Wallpaper* fashion & creative director Jason Hughes. ‘The kind that you feel lucky to have witnessed.’

In this spirit, the Wallpaper* style team reminisce on their personal style moments of 2025.

‘This year was undoubtedly about the debuts, and I really felt like the combination of Matthieu Blazy at Chanel and Jonathan Anderson at Dior – despite being distinct in their visions – set fashion’s new mood, and captured the feeling of a slate being wiped clean. Both had a clarity of vision that was exciting to watch: at Dior, I loved the focus on form – and the brilliant accessories – while Chanel had a feeling of joy and energy, bolstered by great clothes and craft (I was a huge fan of Blazy’s work at Bottega Veneta). I’m excited to see the two designers’ vision unfold in 2026 – particularly their debut couture shows in January.

‘On a personal front, I also loved travelling to Shanghai for Hermès’ “The Second Chapter” show – a continuation of Nadège Vanhée’s A/W 2025 womenswear collection for the house. I loved the cleverly layered and stacked-up looks – sweaters around the waist, bags across the chest, leather water bottle holders slung from bags. It played out in North Bund Bay on the banks of the Huangpu River in a specially constructed structure: as the show began, a series of shutters swung open to reveal Shanghai’s glimmering, futuristic skyline beyond. It made for an arresting spectacle – the kind that you feel lucky to have witnessed.’

‘2025 has proved a landmark year in fashion, notable for the number of debuts which dominated headlines and social-media feeds (whether positive or negative, online commentary has been passionate). For sheer spectacle, it was Matthieu Blazy’s Chanel: stepping into the Grand Palais, which had been transformed into an enormous simulacrum of the solar system, was true take-your-breath-away stuff. The collection itself had a feeling of levity, encapsulated by Awar Odhiang’s gleeful spinning finale – she was undoubtedly the model of the season. On the other end of the spectrum was Simone Bellotti’s debut at Jil Sander – eschewing theatrics, he showed in the stark-white surroundings of the brand’s Milanese headquarters. I loved the collection: sharp and sensual, with the intriguing proportions that he brought to his previous role at Bally, it was the type of collection that you immediately want to wear everything you’d seen.

‘Smaller in scale, but no less impactful, was Craig Green’s return to the runway – a delirious, psychedelic outing that looked towards The Beatles and 1960s bedsheets for inspiration. It was an honour following the collection’s progress in the October 2025 ‘Long View’ issue of Wallpaper*, from his showroom in London’s Docklands to the Paris runway. “Creativity is how everything moves forward,” he told me. “You need creative thought for things to progress, and for new things to happen. You have to have the freedom to make mistakes, to create work and not live in fear.” In our increasingly algorithmic society, they seem to be words to live by.’

‘As a native New Yorker, I was pleased to see Matthieu Blazy bring his first Métiers d’Art show for Chanel to the New York subway – even if it was a little more cleaned up than the cross-city commutes I’m used to. Taking place on the platform of the now-disused Bowery station on the Lower East Side, the collection was every bit as exhilarating as his much-discussed debut show in Paris earlier this year, conjuring a fantastical cast of characters you might encounter on the New York street – from Upper East Side ladies at lunch to those headed to the office. It was a joy – and made me excited to go back this Christmas.

‘As for what I'm taking from the runway into my own wardrobe, it has to be the stacked-up charm bracelets and belts of Michael Rider’s first two collections for Celine – they appeal to my magpie-like sensibilities, and have got me searching out charm bracelets of my own. Beauty-wise, I was seduced by the dishevelled hair and stripped-back make-up of Prada’s A/W 2025 show – courtesy of Guido Palau and Lynsey Alexander – which gives an excuse for a just-rolled-out-of-bed look I’m tempted to embrace come January.’

‘My favourite fashion moment of the year was Simone Bellotti’s debut for Jil Sander. The shades of blue and red, the sharp silhouettes, the casting – including Guinevere Van Seenus, who appeared in the brand’s early campaigns. It just felt so fresh and beautiful as it came down the runway. I’m really excited to see where he takes the brand next.

‘As a side note, I’ve also loved listening to the music that soundtracked Wanderlust, a film shot in Hamburg he released for the brand over the summer. It’s a particularly calming kind of astral electro by Bochum Welt, and is the perfect soundtrack for wandering through a city.’

This has been a watershed year in fashion. A quarter of the way through the 21st century, 2025 saw the industry hit refresh: in September alone, 15 designers made their debuts as creative directors of fashion’s major houses, ushering in a bold new era in style (and, as with any such change, prompting passionate – and oftentimes divided – online commentary).

Here, as selected by the Wallpaper* style team, are the 25 fashion moments that defined the zeitgeist in 2025 – from a viral Marty Supreme track jacket and Saint Laurent’s thigh-high wader boots, to big-name buyouts, runway returns and, of course, all those debuts.

Willy Chavarria made his mark in Paris with a powerful duo of shows

In January, CFDA Award-winning designer Willy Chavarria chose to shift his runway show from New York, where he lives and works, to Paris. A striking first show, held at the American Church on Quai d’Orsay, came just a few days after Trump’s inauguration, with Chavarria – whose runway shows have long been a clarion call for the rights of immigrants and the queer community – soundtracking the show with Reverend Mariann Edgar Budde’s sermon imploring the incoming president to ‘have mercy’ towards marginalised communities. ‘It was so beautiful, and it fell exactly in line with what we were doing,’ he told Wallpaper* of the speech. ‘I wanted to show that everyone is welcome, and to do that in a church seemed like the most pronounced way of showing queer people, trans people, in this environment where they were the saints’. His sophomore Paris show, this summer, was similarly impactful: it opened with 35 kneeling men wearing white T-shirts made in partnership with the American Civil Liberties Union (ACLU), a reference to those being unlawfully detained by ICE in the United States.

READ: Willy Chavarria: ‘We’re still so stuck in fashion’s old guard’

Faux fur and shearling took over the runway

Not a moment, per se, though the proliferation of faux fur and shearling on the runway – spanning both the men’s and women’s collections – was one of the year’s undeniable style takeaways (so much so, we even spotted it on the spring/summer runways). ‘When worn, it becomes a heady meeting place of signifiers – luxury, wealth, power, but also protection, armour against the elements, an ancient and primal urge to be swaddled in the spoils of the hunt,’ we wrote earlier this year of the renaissance of fur – albeit in imitation fabrics – which seemed to a response to the tumult of contemporary living. Indeed, at Prada, where co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons presented a collection of ‘Raw Glamour’, ‘fur’ coats – constructed from cleverly manipulated shearling – had strange protusions at the collar or were trapped under plastic. ‘We asked ourselves, what is femininity today? It is a constant questioning,’ said Mrs Prada. ‘It is not my job to be political, but when you open a newspaper – oh my God! Our job is to think about what clothes a woman can wear, about what kind of femininity makes sense in this moment.’

READ: Faux fur and shearling dominated the A/W 2025 runways – these pieces capture the material’s ‘raw glamour’

Alessandro Michele entertained with a showstopping haute couture debut for Valentino

Haute couture was always going to be a medium which suited Alessandro Michele, the former Gucci creative director who now heads up Valentino. For his first couture collection for the house – presented this past February – the Italian designer, known for theatrical runway shows and richly imaginative collections, hit new heights, employing the ‘petits mains’ of the Valentino atelier to create a series of showstopping gowns. In a style typical to the deep-thinking designer, they were explained in the book-length collection notes through the language of philosophy and semiotics – Homer, James Joyce and Italo Calvino were all mentioned – with each gown representing a ‘list’ of words and influences (‘[lists] confine the infinite extension of the existing within a meaningful framework… to bring some order to the chaos of the universe,’ Michele wrote, quoting Umberto Eco). These surreal lists scrolled across the show’s set on a series of ticker-tape screens as the dramatic looks wandered across the stage, a millefeuille of satin, lace and tulle – eclectic, intricate and, as fashion sleuths showed after the show, rooted in the Valentino archive. ‘To attempt to describe each look – and its multitude of elements – would require a pages-long list of its own,’ we wrote at the time. ‘It was best to simply let yourself be entertained.’

READ: Inside Alessandro Michele’s showstopping debut haute couture show for Valentino

Martine Rose held her first gallery show – an ode to Bronski Beat’s radical energy

During London Fashion Week in February, Martine Rose hosted her first gallery show at Sadie Coles HQ, revisiting her 2016 film Everything Must Change – a Sharna Osbourne-shot short starring Bronski Beat frontman Jimmy Somerville. ‘Pop charts at the time I was introduced to Jimmy Somerville’s voice were dominated by gay musicians: Erasure, Bronski Beat, Marc Almond,’ Rose told Wallpaper*. ‘Mainstream pop by out and proud gay men making serious, respected pop music – not tokenistic – which can never be replicated. It was a radical time for music, all about individuality, no stylists, all genuine expression.’ It’s a statement that captures the radical, subculture-infused energy of Rose’s own work: later that year, in June, she staged a one-off show in an abandoned west London job centre, adorned for the occasion in boudoir-style ruffled curtains. ‘I was exploring this new shrunken silhouette,’ she said after the show. ‘Everything feels a bit cinched, a bit too tight, slightly awkward, but somehow still sexy, I hope.’ It is this idiosyncratic approach – at once strange, sexy and real – which has made Martine Rose one of London’s defining voices, doing things her own way for close to two decades.

READ: Martine Rose’s first gallery show celebrates the radical queer energy of Bronski Beat

Calvin Klein returned to the runway with a new ‘sexitude’

In February, Calvin Klein hosted its first runway show since the departure of Raf Simons in 2018 (under him, the runway collections went under the moniker Calvin Klein 205W39NYC; now, they are back to being called Calvin Klein Collection). In one of the year’s first notable debuts, it was former The Row designer Veronica Leoni who took the helm, seeking a mood of sensual minimalism she dubbed ‘sexitude’ – a nod to the pulsing undercurrent of eroticism which ran through the brand’s advertising campaigns and collections in the 1990s. ‘When it comes to sexiness, it’s more like an attitude,’ the Italian designer said backstage. ‘You own it in the way you wear the clothes. I think it’s really intimate being sexy – regardless of the silhouette, the amount of skin, it’s about the confidence.’ The collection came with the blessing of Mr Klein himself, who watched on from the front row. ‘He told me he was happy he had found a new coat to buy,’ she said. ‘I’m really proud for him to feel at home again.’

READ: For her Calvin Klein debut, Veronica Leoni stripped it all back

Fendi celebrated its centenary with a blockbuster show in Milan

2025 was a definitive year for Fendi: not only did it mark a century since the fashion house was founded in Rome, but, after the departure of artistic director of womenswear and couture Kim Jones in October 2024, the beginning of its new chapter. As such, in February, Fendi opened the doors to its newly renovated Milanese headquarters for a celebratory runway show, seeing house scion Silvia Venturini Fendi take the reins for the blockbuster spectacle which included a cast of Fendi muses, past and present. The granddaughter of house founders Adele and Edoardo Fendi, Venturini Fendi started at the house in the 1990s under Karl Lagerfeld, and would go on to head up menswear and accessories, though this was just the second time she had also designed the womenswear line (the first was after Lagerfeld’s death in 2019). Talking to Wallpaper*, she said that it was an honour to head up such a definitive show for both her family and the house – but was adamant this was not about living in the past: ‘I tried to avoid any precise reference because, to me, anniversaries are beautiful, but you don’t want it to be a retrospective or nostalgic’. After presenting a second co-ed collecti on in September, she stepped down from the creative role to become ‘honorary president’. Her successor will be former Dior creative director Maria Grazia Chiuri in a much-rumoured move.

READ: Silvia Venturini Fendi on luxury, lineage and looking to the future: ‘If it reminds me of something we’ve already done, we move on’

Prada agreed to purchase Versace for $1.375 billion

The subject of much speculation and rumour after Donatella Versace stepped down from her role as creative director the month prior, in April, it was confirmed that the Prada Group reached an agreement to purchase Versace after the Italian house was put on sale by former owner Capri Holdings earlier in the year. Agreeing to a deal of $1.375 billion for 100 per cent of the company – well below the initial $2 billion asking price – it marked a definitive move from the Prada Group to establish an Italian luxury conglomerate (The Prada Group comprises Miu Miu, Church's and Car Shoe; in 1999, it purchased controlling stakes in Jil Sander and Helmut Lang, though they were later sold). ‘We are delighted to welcome Versace to the Prada Group and to build a new chapter for a brand with which we share a strong commitment to creativity, craftmanship and heritage,’ said Patrizio Bertelli, Prada Group chairman and executive director, at the time (the deal was completed in December). ‘We aim to continue Versace’s legacy, celebrating and re-interpreting its bold and timeless aesthetic; at the same time, we will provide it with a strong platform.’

READ: Donatella Versace is stepping down as creative director

The Met’s Costume Institute explored the figure of the Black Dandy

In a year which was notable for its slew of fashion exhibitions – from the confection-like gowns of ‘Marie Antoinette Style’ at London’s V&A to a Rick Owens retrospective featuring a lifelike sculpture of the designer ‘urinating’ water into a trough below – the Metropolitan Museum’s annual Costume Institute exhibition in May still demands the most attention. This is largely because of the accompanying Met Gala – the starry event heralds the exhibition’s opening – though it is also down to the Costume Institute’s head curator Andrew Bolton’s eye for finding intriguing subject matter in the Met’s extensive archive. This year, he drafted Monica L Miller, author of Slaves to Fashion: Black Dandyism and the Styling of Black Diasporic Identity, to help curate the exhibition, which traced the sartorial history of the Black Dandy from the 18th century to the present day. Titled ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’, alongside historical garments, it featured the work – or personal wardrobes – of Virgil Abloh, Andre Leon Talley and Grace Wales Bonner, among others, with set design for the arresting exhibition courtesy of artist Torkwase Dyson. ‘I clocked into how people have fashioned themselves as a manipulation of autonomy and ownership in which clothing is a resistance,’ she told Wallpaper* of the design, which riffed on her signature trapezoid sculptures.

READ: Torkwase Dyson’s set design for ‘Superfine: Tailoring Black Style’ at The Met meditates on ownership, charisma and histories

Saint Laurent’s viral knee-high boots heralded menswear’s dark, sensual mood

At Cannes film festival, while promoting queer ‘dom-com’ Pillion – a film which explores a dom/sub relationship between a shy parking attendant and a biker – Swedish actor Alexander Skarsgård donned a thigh-high leather wader boot by Anthony Vaccarrello for Saint Laurent. Shown at the house’s runway show earlier that year, it became one of the viral accessories of the year, worn by everyone from Pedro Pascal to Marc Jacobs, and ubiquitous in magazine spreads. Inspired by an imagined meeting between two men who designed the aesthetic of the 1980s – Yves Saint Laurent and Robert Mapplethorpe – the collection captured a mood of dangerous sensuality which ran throughout the season, from Prada’s patchworked leathers to Maximilian Davis’s S/S 2026 Ferragamo collection, inspired by the languid sensuality of Pina Bausch and the Tanztheater Wuppertal. Vaccarello dubbed it a ‘menacing, seductive elegance’ – classic menswear with an inflection of kink.

READ: Inspired by Robert Mapplethorpe, Saint Laurent’s surprise menswear show captured ‘a menacing, seductive elegance’

Homme Plissé Issey Miyake channelled la dolce vita in Florence

It would prove one of the most memorable show locations of the year: unfolding against a painterly Florentine sky at sunset, Homme Plissé Issey Miyake staged its S/S 2026 show at Medicea della Petraia, a former Medici residence on Monte Morello in the rolling Tuscan countryside. A guest of Pitti Uomo menswear fair, the Issey Miyake offshoot used the occasion to introduce a new roving format of runway show: eschewing its usual place on the Paris Fashion Week schedule (its position has been taken by IM Men, another brand in the Issey Miyake family), it will show in a series of locations around the world in the coming seasons. As such, collections will draw inspiration from local landscapes: here, it was done via an evocative use of colour, utilising hues sourced through trips the design team had taken around Italy (from ’Cinque Terre Yellow’ to ‘Zucchini Flower Orange’). The result was a collection which fused Italian charm with Homme Plissé’s pioneering fabrications: played out in the villa’s winding, maze-like gardens, it was impossible not to be seduced.

READ: With an ode to Italy, Homme Plissé Issey Miyake brings its brand of fashion magic to Florence’s Pitti Uomo

Rick Owens spread the love with a Paris retrospective

‘I’m surprised I got so far,’ Rick Owens told Wallpaper* in a wide-ranging conversation to mark the opening of ‘Temple of Love’, a career-spanning retrospective at Paris’ Palais Galliera. A celebration of the American designer’s singular approach – one laced with both subversion and wit – the exhibition took attendees on a trip from his early years on Hollywood Boulevard in the 1990s (a recreation of his Los Angeles bedroom of the time appears in the exhibition) towards his blockbuster spectacles at Paris’ Palais de Tokyo (indeed, in June, an opening party took place just after his S/S 2026 menswear show, with guests simply having to cross the road from one institution to another). ‘Michèle [Lamy, Owens’ wife] kept telling me, ‘You gotta stop calling it a retrospective!’ She doesn't like the finality – I'm leaning into it,’ he said. ‘A retrospective implies a decline, it makes you think about legacy and mortality and ageing, and how long do you stay relevant, and how important is that? I don't have the answers to any of those things, but I am thinking about them and addressing them publicly.’

READ: ‘I’m surprised that I got this far’: Rick Owens on his bombastic Paris retrospective, ‘Temple of Love’

Jonathan Anderson rebooted his brand – and debuted at Dior

It was a busy June for Jonathan Anderson. Alongside his much-anticipated debut show at Dior – a menswear offering for S/S 2026 presented at Paris’ Hôtel National des Invalides, which astutely reworked formal dress codes – the Northern Irish designer also revealed a rebooted vision for his eponymous, London-based label JW Anderson, which propelled him to renown after it was established in 2008. Doing away with the label’s usual seasonal runway shows, the new vision centres on the idea of the shop: in Paris, during haute couture week, he constructed a simulacrum of a new store concept by architects Sanchez Benton which included not only a fashion collection (a greatest hits of sorts, seeing signature pieces imbued with a greater commitment to craft) but a curation of intriguing objects and curiosities, from ceramics and vintage gardening tools to furniture, art, even honey. 'I like change. I have wanted to change things around for two years now, and finally I feel at one with who I am today and what the brand means,’ he told Wallpaper*. ‘It’s things that I either want to wear or want to live with.’

READ: Jonathan Anderson’s Dior debut: ‘bringing joy to the art of dressing’

Craig Green returned to the runway – and to Paris

After just over a decade in business, Craig Green remains one of British fashion’s definitive voices – a singular creative force whose imaginative collections transform humble menswear archetypes (workwear, uniforms, biker jackets) through imaginative construction and unusual fabrications, oftentimes evoking sculpture. This year, he made his return to Paris Fashion Week, having shown a year prior in his London studio, and elsewhere via lookbook (Green is one of a handful of designers who seem to be flourishing outside of the typical fashion calendar). The show was one of our highlights of the year: a poetic, free-thinking collection inspired by The Beatles, psychedelics and 1960s bed sheets – albeit in his typically inventive style. ‘Creativity how everything moves forward,’ Green told us in the October 2025 ‘Long View’ issue of Wallpaper*, in which we documented the process behind the collection. ‘You need creative thought for things to progress, and for new things to happen. You have to have the freedom to make mistakes, to create work and not live in fear.’

READ: ‘You have to be fearless’: inside the free-thinking world of Craig Green

Glenn Martens unveiled his vision for Maison Margiela

The task was unenviable: as the new creative director of Maison Margiela, Belgian designer Glenn Martens would not only have to follow the house’s namesake – arguably the most influential designer of recent times – but also John Galliano, his predecessor, whose final collection, which conjured a troupe of contorted dolls on the drizzly moonlit banks of the Seine, was a true fashion epic. But Martens, who comes with a pedigree of his own after zeitgeist-defining stints at Y/Project and Diesel, was more than up for a challenge. His own creatures were sheathed in masks (a nod to a Margiela hallmark, that of anonymity) and appeared pulled through the the walls of history – quite literally, with a melange of jacquards, Renaissance motifs and embossed leather (inspired by 16th-century Flemish wallpaper), evoking the faded grandeur of abandoned stately homes (indeed, the show set was a series of ‘palatial interiors’ printed on crumpled and crased paper). We called it a ‘thrilling’ debut, a task of ‘reinvention and reconstruction – a precarious balance of what to take and what to leave behind’.

READ: Glenn Martens’ thrilling Maison Margiela debut was a balancing act between past, present and future

Fashion East celebrated a ‘rowdy and raw’ 25 years of nurturing emerging talent

In September, Fashion East’s S/S 2026 runway show doubled as a celebration: 2025 marked 25 years of the Brick Lane-based talent incubator, which was founded by Lulu Kennedy to help forge the careers of London’s rising stars. The roll call of names which have passed through its doors is proof of its success: Jonathan Anderson, Martine Rose, Kim Jones, Craig Green and Grace Wales Bonner are all alumni of the unique scheme, which has long encapsulated London’s unique brand of young talent – defiantly creative, ‘rowdy and raw’ (as Kennedy herself described in a letter distributed to guests at the show). Taking place at the ICA, this season’s show – comprising collections by Nuba, Jacek Gleba and Mayhew – doubled as a Nike-sponsored exhibition tracing Fashion East’s impressive quarter century through its memorable clothing and ephemera, from Green’s ‘broken-fence’ chestplates to a leopard-print cake by Mowalola. Later in the year, in December, Kennedy and her creative partner Raphaelle Moore collected a Special Recognition Award at the 2025 Fashion Awards. ‘We’re proud to have created a unique space where designers have both the freedom to create fearlessly, and a family unit to uplift them,’ they said.

September’s fashion week saw almost too many debuts to count

2025 was fashion’s big reshuffle, seeing an unprecedented number of designers making their debuts at fashion’s biggest houses – from Dior to Chanel, Gucci to Celine. It was September fashion month, though, that was a true changing of the guard moment, with over 15 designers presenting their first collections as newly installed creative leads. These spanned an energetic and playful debut from Nicholas Aburn at Area in New York (the former Balenciaga designer riffed on the figure of the party girl in irreverent style), Simone Bellotti’s masterful first outing at Jil Sander, which saw him astutely explore ideas of modernity and lightness (staged in the brand’s white-walled Milan headquarters, it was a true clean slate momet), or Pierpaolo Piccioli’s typically heartfelt first collection for Balenciaga (an appearance from the Duchess of Sussex ensured column inches).

Elsewhere, notable debuts included Louise Trotter at Bottega Veneta, Glenn Martens at Maison Margiela, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez at Loewe and Duran Lantink at Jean Paul Gaultier. And, while these debuts were largely lauded – particularly by critics – fiercer debates broke out online in the depths of Instagram comment sections. ‘I have read some really heinous comments about the work of many designers in these last few days,’ wrote Perfect magazine’s Edward Buchanan, former design director of Bottega Veneta, in a much-shared post. ‘It is not always perfect, and it is not always what you personally imagined it to be. You don’t have to like everything… but why not celebrate and talk about what you love?’

Though in Paris, it was Chanel and Dior which commanded the most attention

There were two debuts, though, which commanded the most attention: Jonathan Anderson’s womenswear debut for Dior (he had previously shown his first menswear collection in June) and Matthieu Blazy’s opening act for Chanel. Shrugging off the weight of expectation, both collections provided an astute and contemporary viewpoint on the future of two of fashion’s most storied houses – Anderson through a fearless ‘recoding’ of the house’s archive in his idosyncratic style (we said it was a collection of ‘bravery, vision and instinct’), Blazy through a collection of unbridled freedom and optimism (a twirling Awar Odhiang in a gown of kaleidoscopic feathers, the model who memorably closed the show, encapsulated the ‘triumphant’ mood). After Chanel, which marked the end of fashion month, we said that after all of the debuts, it finally felt like a ‘weight had been lifted’. ‘There will be no more anticipation or speculation, no more guessing games or gossip. The designers are in place, and a new chapter of fashion has begun – from there, the hard work begins.’

While Demna marked his Gucci debut with a Demi Moore-starring film

In what proved an astute move, the Georgian designer Demna – previously of Balenciaga – got ahead of the season’s other debuts by presenting his first collection as creative director of Gucci on the first day of Milan Fashion Week, allowing him a moment in which he dominated the narrative (and, of course, social media). Revealed first through a lookbook of Gucci ‘archetypes’, rewritten in his typically irreverent and subversive style (he called it a ‘bold, sexy new chapter’ for the house), it was followed up by a Spike Jonze and Halina Reijn-directed short, premiered at Milan’s Palazzo Mezzanotte. Titled The Tiger, it starred Demi Moore as the fictional ’head of Gucci international and chairman of California’ whose world begins to unravel at a family gathering. Even cleverer? Demna will get another ‘debut’ in 2026 when he holds his first runway for the house during Milan Fashion Week, in February.

READ: Gucci reveals its ‘bold, unapologetically sexy’ new era under Demna

The fashion world mourned the death of Giorgio Armani

In early September, the fashion world mourned the death of Giorgio Armani, an arbiter of Italian style who founded his eponymous house half a century ago, in 1975. One of fashion’s great success stories, Mr Armani began the label using funds made from selling his old Volkswagen Beetle; on his death, he left behind a multi-billion dollar empire spanning not only fashion but homeware, hotels, restaurants, fragrances and cosmetics. To mark his death, after a private funeral held earlier in the month, well-wishers gathered at Milan Fashion Week in September for his final Giorgio Armani show. Originally intended to celebrate 50 years in business, it took place at Brera’s Pinacoteca di Brera, where an accompanying exhibition unfolded in the galleries above. As ever, the S/S 2026 collection – modelled on a cast of Armani models past and present and watched on by muses Richard Gere, Lauren Hutton and Cate Blanchett – encapsulated Mr Armani’s brand of soft elegance, culminating with model Agnes Zogla in a glimmering gown adorned with his face. Afterwards, guests milled the galleries, where the designer’s work took its fitting place amid the great Italian masters – from Bellini to Raphael.

READ: In Milan, the fashion world gathers to say goodbye to Giorgio Armani at his final show

A Virgil Abloh exhibition celebrated his landmark legacy

Just over four years since his death, American designer Virgil Abloh leaves behind a towering legacy – one which was celebrated this September in Paris with the opening of an exhibition at the Grand Palais. Open for just a few days (cue a sold out booking system and snaking queues around the block), the exhibition opened the doors to his prolific archive of objects, clothing, ephemera, furniture and art, displayed across sprawling tables and shelves as if stepping into his headquarters. Indeed, one senses the polymathic designer – who made history as the first Black creative director of Louis Vuitton – would enjoy the exhibition’s approach, which eshewed the behind-glass formality of the traditional museum (only self-restraint stopped you from picking up the objects on display). Titled ‘Virgil Abloh: The Codes’, the idea is for it to go on display around the world. ‘This is a true celebration of Virgil's vision and ethos,’ said the late designer’s wife, Shannon Abloh. ‘This offers an invitation to the world to engage and to build upon his ideas.’

READ: Inside the Paris exhibition cataloguing Virgil Abloh’s extraordinary archive

Grace Wales Bonner is appointed at Hermès

In late October, Hermès announced the appointment of Grace Wales Bonner as the house’s head of menswear, replacing Véronique Nichanian who made the choice to step down from the role after a record-breaking 37-year tenure (the longest of any working creative director at a fashion house). It felt long overdue for the British designer. An LVMH Prize-winning designer whose deeply felt collections for her eponymous label Wales Bonner – exploring themes of Black masculinity, migration and luxury – have consistently won plaudits for rich storytelling and meticulous craftsmanship, leading many to question why she hadn’t been chosen for a creative director role sooner (she had been rumoured for roles at both Louis Vuitton and Givenchy which went to Pharrell Williams and Sarah Burton respectively). On social media, there was a rare positive consensus on the decision: in her own post, the designer, who was born in South London to a British mother and Jamaican father, expressed her ‘deep honour’ at being chosen for the role. ‘It is a dream realised to embark on this new chapter, following in a lineage of inspired craftspeople and designers,’ she wrote.

READ: Lauded British designer Grace Wales Bonner is the new head of menswear at Hermès

1980s ‘architect of glamour’ Antony Price returned to the runway

The fashion critic Alexander Fury – who is an avid collector of his work – has called Antony Price, a British fashion designer who came to prominence in the 1980s, as ‘criminally underrated’. Best known for creating the visual universe of Roxy Music, and staging similarly dramatic runway shows in the decade, the ‘architect of glamour’ made a welcome runway return in November, courtesy of a one-off salon show with London-based label 16Arlington. Staged in the latter’s east London studio, the high-profile cast – from Lily Allen to Adwoa Aboah – prowled the runway in the high-voltage creations, puffing on cigarettes before posing for photographer Felix Cooper. ‘I personally felt Antony never really received his flowers,’ Capaldo told Wallpaper*. ‘To have been able to witness such a legend at work has probably been one of the most incredible and pivotal moments in my career. It's been really magical.’ Sadly, it was announced that Price passed away at the age of 80 on 17 December 2025.

READ: ‘Architect of glamour’ Antony Price makes a high-voltage return to the runway with 16Arlington

Dario Vitale said goodbye to Versace

It was to be one of fashion’s shortest tenures – just a few short months after his debut, in December, it was announced that Italian designer Dario Vitale would be exiting Versace. The former design director of Miu Miu, and the successor to Donatella Versace, the news came as some surprise: Vitale’s debut show at Milan Fashion Week, though divisive, had won over critics and was already being worn by celebrities (Olivia Dean wore custom Versace for a recent SNL appearance, while Addison Rae was also an early adopter). We said that Vitale had ‘stripped back conceptions and ushered in an energetic new vision: sexually charged and ‘reckless’, one that harkened back to the dress codes of Gianni Versace without nostalgia.’ On social media, the announcement came with some disappointment at the way in which designers are given so little time to make their mark: ‘There’s a disturbing pattern across the fashion industry: giant companies, plucking creative directors, placing them on a pedestal, parading them as the future, and then discarding them just as quickly,’ wrote casting director Anita Bitton in a much-shared Instagram post.

In Vienna, there was a chance to see Helmut Lang’s fashion archive for the first time

Though he exited the industry 20 years ago, Helmut Lang’s influence on fashion remains palpable. A definitive figure of the 1990s, he proposed a vision of sensually-charged minimalism and utility which continues to define the way that we dress today. He also changed the way we consume fashion, too: his memorable New York runway shows stripped back the artifice of the 1980s and its elevated runway, drafting friends to walk alongside supermodels, while stripped-back campaigns were captured by a young Juergen Teller. This revolutionary spirit is celebrated in ‘Séance de Travail 1986-2005’, an exhibition which opened in December at MAK in Vienna, which marks the first time Helmut Lang’s fashion archive is on show to the public – from memorable garments to archival film, ephemera, even recreations of elements from his equally definitive stores (Lang donated his archive to the institution in 2011). ‘Looking at Helmut Lang’s store architecture, it became obvious: his stores were all about directing the gaze. This is also what exhibitions need to do, but here it was essential. A photo wouldn’t suffice; you have to experience it,’ curator Marlies Wirth told Wallpaper* of the exhibition, which is designed to immerse you in the Lang universe – all the way down to the floor, which features a seating plan from a runway show.

READ: Inside Helmut Lang’s fashion archive in Vienna, which still defines how we dress today

Marty Supreme birthed the year’s viral garment – thanks to Timothée Chalamet

The Marty Supreme press tour has already come with some memorable sartorial moments – the film’s star Timothée Chalamet and girlfiend Kylie Jenner in matching orange Chrome Hearts for one – though it was more humble track jacket which went viral in December (the Josh Safdie-directed film is out on Christmas Day in the United States). The nylon windbreaker, created by the film’s production company A24 alongside California-based label Nahmias, was part of a merch drop for the film – adorned with ‘Marty Supreme’ and three gold stars, Chalamet has barely taken it off since. Pop-ups in New York and London have seen queues around the block to lay their hands on the $250 jacket – with resale sites selling the garment for up to for up to £4,366 (that’s over 20 times its original price). It speaks not only to A24’s marketing prowess, but also to the rise of movie merch – at the end of 2024, Mary Cleary explored its rise for Wallpaper*. ‘How it will continue to play out is yet to be seen, but one thing is almost certain: movie merch will continue to take over fashion,’ she wrote – and was right.

Picture 90 Giancarlo Piretti 106 desk chairs positioned in perfect parallel, accompanied by needle-sharp Prada pencils and crisp Prada notepads. To the side, Marchesi’s precision-cut rectangular finger sandwiches and chilled water served in Miuccia Prada’s favourite Ittala tumblers are lined up as refreshments alongside biscotti served on three-ply paper napkins.

What could very well read as a description of one of Prada’s legendary OMA-designed catwalk shows at the Fondazione Prada is instead the scene of the conference room at the group’s Scandicci production site in the epicentre of Tuscany’s industrial fashion hub, where all Prada and Miu Miu (soon to be joined by Versace) handbags are made. It’s not your usual corporate setting, but then, like everything it puts its name to, even a Prada press conference hits a little differently.

The Prada Group Academy celebrates 25 years

The details were apt to celebrate an important moment in the Prada Group’s history this week: the 25th anniversary of one of its proudest entities, the Prada Group Academy. Housed on the Scandicci site, it has been the brand’s heartbeat of artisanal education since 2000, imparting the exacting standards and fastidious attention to detail that it hopes will preserve artisanal Made in Italy craftsmanship and, over time, future-proof its output.

‘What we do here is 80 per cent hands, hearts and thoughts… it’s manic attention to detail, but the details build the overall picture – this is a total focus we have put in place,’ Prada CEO Andrea Guerra told reporters. ‘What matters is the continuing ability to plan, to be patient, and to look ahead. When you have an academy, you can’t think someone can produce a bag after three months; it’s a long path and journey. But we are not in a hurry. If you are in a hurry in the luxury field, you'd better change your business.’

Teaching skills in leather goods, footwear and ready-to-wear, the academy has trained 571 students (69.7 per cent women and 30.3 per cent men) in both practical and technical skills since 2021. The year-long course sees students’ progress – in practical tasks including pattern-cutting, stitching, glueing and handling raw materials, as well as mastering cutting-edge machinery – constantly assessed by maestros, many of whom have worked for the Prada Group for over 30 years.

With up to 70 per cent of each cohort being integrated into full-time positions on the factory floor each year, appetite is growing. This year alone saw a 28 per cent increase in enrolment, with additional courses on external sites specialising in knitwear and men’s footwear, revealed the brand. Speaking alongside Guerra, Prada chief marketing officer, Lorenzo Bertelli, said that far from evoking the nostalgia of Made in Italy artisanship, the academy seeks to make craft ‘contemporary and current’.

‘I don’t see what we’re doing as nostalgic – it’s very exciting to see that something was perceived as nostalgic before is a modern source of value,’ said Bertelli. ‘Despite the advancements of robotics that can replace people – the fact that people can still do things with their hands is the most exciting and contemporary thing we have.’

At 37, the son of Miuccia Prada and group CEO Patrizio Bertelli would have been only 12 when the academy welcomed its first students. In the two-and-a-half decades since, it has nurtured a multigenerational artisanal workforce that is expertly versed in what makes a Prada Group product among the most desirable in the world and positioned Bertelli Jnr as its chief marketing officer and ardent spokesperson.

‘In a world where technology is replacing process, technology cannot replace the ability to work with your hands and craftsmanship,’ said Bertelli, pointing to Prada’s ongoing collaboration with Axiom Space, producing Nasa spacesuits as an example. ‘We are currently working on the next Artemis mission and when we went to the States, they didn’t know how to sew the pattern of the space uniform – they needed basic knowledge and information,’ he said, noting these are skills acquired in the first year of training at the academy.

Joined by two of the group’s leather goods operators, Francesca Rettori and Leonardo Nesi, who both graduated from the academy, Bertelli reassured them that the skills they have acquired give them an invaluable skill set in the advent of AI.

‘I don’t see AI and craftsmanship as opposing things,’ he said. ‘They will converge sooner or later, but there is no clash between the two. There is a clash between AI and everything that revolves around AI – filling in Excel files is something that AI can do, and up until two or three years ago, people studied coding [to do this]. Today, you have be agile and flexible – and this is one area that I think there will be longevity. I don’t believe with a tablet you can create a bag.’

The celebration of the academy’s milestone, said chief people officer Rosa Santamaria Maurizio, provides Prada with a moment of reflection on its investment. ‘Twenty-five years for the academy is a crucial anniversary as it is a time that raises emotions. The academy is strategic for our company, it safeguards Made in Italy, safeguards craftsmanship, and creates an exchange between generations.’

pradagroup.com

We are a peripatetic generation: restlessly curious and forever plotting the next trip. It’s a trait that proves surprisingly useful when it comes to gifting. Travel-minded presents rarely miss the mark; they signal care in its most pragmatic form, helping to plan, elevate or ease someone’s journey.

Our edit strikes a balance between function, comfort and design intelligence. True to Wallpaper*’s sensibility, it gathers the sharpest designs in tech and lifestyle. The categories may be familiar, but each pick brings a fresh, forward twist on the pieces we reach for time and again.

For more design-driven gifting ideas and aesthetically attuned stocking fillers, explore our other seasonal gift guides.

The Wallpaper* travel gift guide 2025

Analogue in-flight entertainment

Five-star treatment

A chic name-drop

Escape artist

Pleat elite

An order keeper

Mile-high comforter

Free roaming

Lights out

A mood mixer

A reset wash

A flight-mode facial

A pocketable friend

A power move

Do not disturb

Hotel slippers to flip-flops, house socks to bath robes, recent seasons have seen designers reimagine indoor wear for the outside world – a reflection of our desire for home comforts, even when we're on the go. The Row has proved masterful at this switch-up, taking humble homewear and reimagining it in uber-luxurious style – what greater pleasure, designers Mary-Kate and Ashley Olsen seem to say, than stepping out of bed and straight onto the street?

It goes some way to explain the proliferation of bedwear on the runway for A/W 2025, most notably at Prada, where the house’s men’s and womenswear collections both featured pyjamas as a proposition for the everyday (at the men’s show, pyjama sets were shrunken in size and worn with cowboy boots – as if on an early morning or late night wander – while for women, night shirts were stuffed into the waistbands of skirts). They appeared as part of collections that explored the idea of sartorial freedom: ‘within feminine beauty, when you think of its archetypes, there is lots of restriction of the body – here, it is free,’ said co-creative director Raf Simons of the womenswear collection, where the pyjamas’ relaxed proportions were symbolic of this liberated mood.

10 of the best pyjama shirts to take you from bed to street

Though despite their synonymy with relaxation, there is also an innate elegance to classic pyjamas, particularly the shirt – after all, it is a button-up you wear to bed, often rendered in silk, satin or cotton poplin, and cut with a louche, evening-time silhouette that is not unlike traditional formalwear. Dolce & Gabbana’s men’s and women’s collections for S/S 2026 mined this mood – pyjamas were reimagined with smatterings of crystal embellishment or twisting floral embroidery (lingerie-inspired gowns and vertiginous heels presented an even more glamorous counterpoint)

Here, as selected by the Wallpaper* style team, are ten of the best pyjama shirts – good enough to wear out of the bedroom and onto the street.

So the story goes, in 1936, when the Swiss artist Meret Oppenheim displayed a cup and saucer covered in gazelle fur as part of an exhibition at New York’s MoMA, such was the impact of the surrealist object that a woman fainted right in front of it. ‘She left no name with the attendants who revived her – only a vague feeling of apprehension,’ reported the New Yorker of the incident at the time.

This is fur’s visceral power: when worn, it becomes a heady meeting place of signifiers – luxury, wealth, power, but also protection, armour against the elements, an ancient and primal urge to be swaddled in the spoils of the hunt. It can provoke equal outrage and desire, but also an underlying perversity – the surreal wrongness of wearing another’s skin, one which Oppenheim‘s work duly captures. ‘[It is] one of the perverse and pleasing sculptures of the 20th century,’ wrote the critic Andrea K. Scott.

And, Oppenheim’s legacy lives on: as part of the recent Frieze week in London, the buzzy Irish-Australian artist and jeweller Leo Costelloe presented a deer-pelt-covered jug as part of his exhibition ‘Kitchen’ at The Shop, Sadie Coles HQ. He called it his ‘ode to Meret Oppenheim’, part of a series of works which mind the ‘fantasy and unease’ of the domestic realm. ‘I’m naturally drawn to themes that tread the line between aspirational fantasy and desperate reality,’ he told Wallpaper*.

Fur was all over the A/W 2025 runways, too – in illusory form, at least. For the past decade, fashion’s luxury houses have largely done away with the use of fur in their collections: in 2021, the Kering group – which owns Bottega Veneta, Gucci and Balenciaga, among others – banned fur, alongside brands like Prada, Chanel, Dolce & Gabbana and Valentino. Whether evoked through hyper-realistic imitation furs, cleverly manipulated shearlings (shearling is a by-product of the meat industry, rather than farmed) or fluffy fronds of feathers, it was the undeniable material of the season, appearing on both the men’s and women’s runways.

In the collections, designers mined fur’s connotations, suggesting at once a heady, bygone glamour, but also a want for protection against the elements – whether real or existential. At Prada, which featured shearling ‘fur’ trapped under layers of clear plastic or erupting into strange protrusions at the neckline of a coat, co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons said the material evoked the ‘raw glamour’ at the heart of the collection. ‘Glamour was something we were attracted to, instinctively, and its connection to femininity,’ said Mrs Prada at the time. ‘We asked ourselves – what is feminine? What is feminine beauty? What is femininity today? It is a constant questioning, an examining of femininity – what does it mean?’

Here, as selected by the Wallpaper* style team, ten imitation fur and shearling pieces – from classic coats to bandeau tops and accessories – which capture the raw, twisted glamour which ran through the A/W 2025 collections.

In 2018, the Scandinavian artist duo Michael Elmgreen and Ingar Dragset – known through their work as Elmgreen & Dragset – transformed London’s Whitechapel Gallery into a derelict swimming bath, its central pool drained of water and dusted with debris as if long abandoned (there was even the faintest scent of chlorine lingering in the air). A comment on the effect of austerity politics on public institutions – particularly in the rapidly gentrified East End of London – such was the power of the illusion that you wondered if it had, in fact, been hidden there all along.

These artistic tricks have been a hallmark of the Berlin-based duo’s work: there has been a life-sized sculpture of a Prada store in the desert of Marfa, Texas; another swimming pool, turned on its end and erected at New York’s Rockefeller Centre; and a lonely art-fair booth in Paris’ Grand Palais, built a month before the opening of that year’s FIAC, as if the pair had got their dates mixed up. Destabilising the everyday, they use these projects to reveal the machinations of power that exist around us, often unnoticed. ‘Sometimes the most profound “truth” can occur in the most banal images,’ the pair told Wallpaper* at the opening of ‘L’Addition’, a 2024 exhibition at Paris’ Musée d’Orsay, which saw of series of uncanny figures interspersed among the museum’s permanent collection.

Prada Mode London: ‘The Audience’ by Elmgreen & Dragset

A new work, titled ‘The Audience’, provides the centrepiece of Prada Mode, the Italian fashion house’s roving ‘private members’ club’ that invites artists to create site-specific works and curate a programme of events, talks and lectures (this marks its 13th iteration). The previous edition took place earlier this year in Abu Dhabi, curated by the American artist Theaster Gates, while this latest edition opened for previews yesterday (15 October) in London’s Town Hall, a recently inaugurated cultural space close to King’s Cross in the former Camden Council Town Hall (interiors are by Tom Dixon, while Virginia Damtsa is curating its programme).

Opening to coincide with Frieze Week, the immersive installation sees the Town Hall’s vast main room transformed into a 104-seat cinema, occupied by a series of hyper-realistic human figures posed in ‘various states of attention’ – from an embracing couple to a woman consuming popcorn on the front row (another potent visual trick, it takes a moment for your eyes to adjust and work out which of the seated figures are real). Their glassy eyes, all rendered from silicone, are fixed on the cinema screen: on it, a distorted film plays on loop, as if watching a scene from a movie through a perpetually blurry lens.

‘When people come into the installation, [we want them to feel] like they’re too late for the cinema,’ the artists explained at a preview yesterday. ‘We all know this feeling, when you are there at the last minute and everyone is seated already, and you need to sneak in and find your seat. [It’s why] we’ve made just one scene, that feels like it's taken out of a bigger movie – you don’t know when it starts and when it ends. No matter when you arrive, you come in in the middle of the movie.’

The film itself depicts an animated conversation between partners – a painter and a writer – who discuss the potential challenges of their respective mediums. And, while their voices can be heard clearly, the visuals are purposefully blurred – the duo liken it to watching a film without glasses, or as if waiting for a video to buffer and load online. ‘We are experiencing image overload through social media, our news feed,’ they say. ‘So instead, we wanted people to see abstract images, just moving against the screen. We used the blur to obscure the visibility of what was going on.’

The choice of a cinema auditorium – which, over the course of the week, will double as a space for a curated series of talks, lectures and screenings – is part of their continuing desire to interrogate the everyday spaces we occupy. ‘We thought it would be interesting to focus on the cinema as a communal space, a place where people gather,’ they say. ‘It is not an algorithm that decides who you are with. You never know who you will be next to.’ (Here, that includes the hyper-realistic figures, who will occupy the cinema’s seats throughout the week, interspersed among the physical attendees.)

‘This whole build-up with the seats, the steps, and the handrails is not normally here, it’s just an open space,’ they say. ‘What we have so often done with our installations is transform spaces – when we do museum shows, we want to give them a different identity than their normal white boxes, [whether] with swimming pools, airport lounges, or private homes. This time, we thought it would be fun to make a movie theatre that would only be here for five days – one where you are never alone.’

Prada Mode is open to the public from 16-19 October 2025.

You can register at Prada’s website.

If fashion and art were once reticent bedfellows, the past two decades have seen the two mediums enter symbiosis through a near-endless slew of collaborations, exhibition sponsorships, artist-designed runway sets and art-filled boutiques. It is unsurprising, then, that when it comes to the arrival of Frieze Week – whether the fair’s New York, London, Los Angeles or Seoul iterations – a line-up of fashion activations follows.

Such is the case for Frieze London 2025, which opens for previews today (15 October), with numerous fashion brands hosting events across the week. And, while a number of these might seem opportunist grabs for the art world’s cultural heft, an equal number show the potential spoils of the partnership – whether Stone Island’s sponsorship of Frieze Focus (the scheme supports emerging galleries), Dunhill’s always-illuminating Frieze Masters talks, or the arrival of Prada Mode in London, the Italian fashion house’s roving programme of cultural events. For this edition, the house hands the reins to Berlin-based duo Elmgreen & Dragset, who have created a surreal cinema that will host a curated programme of talks, lectures and screenings over the coming days.

Here, Wallpaper* selects the best fashion happenings to add to your Frieze London 2025 schedule.

Dunhill will host its annual Frieze Masters talks

The relative calm of Frieze Masters provides a welcome respite from the frenetic main fair, where low-lit booths and hushed chatter surround an always intriguing display – from ancient antiquity to mid-century masterworks, and all that came in between (the cut-off year to be displayed at Frieze Masters is the year 2000, with the oldest objects dating back millenia). It makes the perfect setting for Dunhill’s tranquil ‘Frieze Masters Talks’, which sees the British heritage house invite a line-up of artistic luminaries – from those with works displayed in Frieze Masters to curators, writers and collectors – to take part in a series of talks across the week, giving visitors a well-earned moment of quiet contemplation amid the noise elsewhere.

Always illuminating, this year’s schedule is curated by director of Fondazione Palazzo Strozzi Arturo Galansino and includes conversations between Tracey Emin and director of the British Museum Nicholas Cullinan (‘Confessions in the Museum’ is the title of their talk), artist Edward George and author Matthew Harle (they will discuss George’s ‘Black Atlas’ project), and artist Anthony Gormley who will discuss ‘Sculpting a New Humanism’ alongside Galansino himself (a full schedule is available on Frieze Masters’ website). Always impeccably staged, the intimate talks and enveloping interiors have the feel of an exclusive member’s club – not unlike Dunhill’s sanctuary-like Bourdon House in Mayfair, the former residence of the Hugh Grosvenor, the 2nd Duke of Westminster.

Discover the full programme here.

Prada Mode arrives in London

Prada Mode is the Italian fashion house’s immersive arts-led programme, which has taken place in a series of locations around the world – the last edition took place in Abu Dhabi earlier this year, seeing American artist Theaster Gates curate a schedule of talks and events in a site-specific space in the city’s MiZa district. After previously taking place in London back in 2019 (the house took over the subterranean basement of 180 Strand, turning it into a surreal jazz bar), the 2025 edition sees Prada Mode return to London, curated by Berlin-based duo Elmgreen & Dragset.

They have created a special installation for the event titled ‘The Audience’ in Town Hall, a recently opened cultural centre close to King’s Cross station, comprising a simulacrum of a cinema populated by a series of their hyper-realistic figures (on the screen, a purposefully blurred movie plays). Running for previews from today (15 October) until 19 October, participants include the artists themselves, as well as Shona Heath, Elizabeth Diller, James Massiah, Kirsty Sedgman, James Price and more, with a series of talks, events and screenings unfolding in the surreal cinema space.

Register for Prada Mode here.

Stone Island continues its support of Frieze Focus

Part of its global Frieze partnership, Italian technical-wear brand Stone Island will support this year’s edition of Frieze Focus, an offshoot of the fair which gives exhibition space to emerging galleries and the artists that they represent. This year, the eclectic line-up spans 35 international galleries, from London’s Nicoletti, which will show works by Texas-born, London-based artist Gray Weilebinski, to institutions in Beirut, Cairo, Shanghai, Warsaw, Seoul and Athens (among many others).

‘This year marks the third consecutive year of our sponsorship of Frieze Focus, a partnership that celebrates the influence of contemporary art within Stone Island’s global community,’ says Robert Triefus, Stone Island’s CEO. ‘We are delighted to continue our support of the Focus section at Frieze, championing emerging gallerists and the artists they represent’

Dover Street Market celebrates Frieze 2025

For each edition of Frieze London, Rei Kawakubo and Adrian Joffe’s Dover Street Market hosts a buzzy evening in the Haymarket concept store, inviting artists and fashion designers alike to set up shop. Taking place on Thursday evening – with further activations happening across the weekend – the eclectic line-up includes a window display featuring pieces by Georgia O’Keefe (Kawakubo has curated the line-up), a showing of work by British artist Sonia Boyce, as well as installations from Air Jordan by Assouline and Stone Island Denim Research. For fashion fans, the event also heralds the arrival of Saint Laurent in the store – the Parisian house will be unveiling their new dedicated space as part of the festivities – and there will be an opportunity to shop a series of special launches, including a series of portable ‘seats’ by Craig Green, revealed by the designer today on Instagram.

Rick Owens displays his furniture at Carpenters Workshop Gallery

Multi-hyphenate fashion designer Rick Owens has chosen Frieze week to open a new exhibition at west London’s Carpenters Workshop Gallery, displaying a series of furniture created alongside his wife Michèle Lamy (she also serves as the exhibition’s curator). Titled ‘Rust Never Sleeps’, the various creations – each in Owens’ signature monolithic style – are largely crafted from patinated metal inspired by London’s long tradition of Brutalist architecture. We got a special walkthrough from Lamy last week, with memorable highlights including an enormous elm bed complete with antler horns, a rusted steel and crocodile leather day bed, and an enormous marble urn, rendered in Owens’ moody, visually arresting style. ‘Taking its title from Neil Young’s 1979 anthem – the exhibition transforms the phrase into a manifesto for artistic endurance: it is better to burn out than to fade away,’ read the lyrical press notes.

Rick Owens: Rust Never Sleeps runs at the Carpenters Workshop London until 14 February 2026.

Phoebe Philo supports Peter Doig’s new exhibition, ‘House of Music’

Phoebe Philo, the former Celine and Chloé designer who now helms an eponymous London label, serves as the principal sponsor of Peter Doig’s new exhibition – a testament to her own long-standing link with the art world. Titled ‘House of Music’, the exhibition at the Serpentine Galleries invites visitors to ‘sit, linger, take a nap’ in the space, which sees the British artist’s paintings displayed amid midcentury furnishings and backdropped by a sound system featuring a bespoke soundtrack comprising over 300 records. ‘The idea of having furniture and chairs here is that some people feel like they can linger, they may even want to have a nap,’ he told Wallpaper*, noting that it was a rare opportunity to see works that are in private hands made public. ‘The paintings often end up in private hands, and the people who get to see them are very few. So, it's making all aspects public.’

READ: ‘Sit, linger, take a nap’: Peter Doig welcomes visitors to his Serpentine exhibition

Contemporary life can feel overwhelming, a constant bombardment of news, adverts and content on the endless scrolls of our screens. This year, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons have been seeking lightness in the face of this fatigue. Their men’s collection, shown in June, unveiled a ‘fresh’ and ‘human’ vision that the pair described as the ‘easiest’ they’ve ever worked on. Its follow-up womenswear show, held this afternoon at Fondazione Prada’s Deposito space, shared a similar feeling of effortlessness. ‘A response to the overload of contemporary culture – a process of distillation, of filtration through clothes,’ is how the pair described it.

Prada’s shows are held each season in the cavernous Deposito, which has in previous seasons been transformed with curtains of falling slime, scaffold structures, and giant paper houses. June, however, was the first time its windows were uncovered – letting the light flood into the space to reveal a sparse setting, which was all but empty save for a few flower-shaped rugs scattered across the floor. This afternoon, the sunshine of Milan was allowed in once again, forming pools of warm light on a glossy, lacquered orange floor – a typically striking Prada hue. A longtime collaborator of Prada, the set was configured by Rem Koolhaas’ architecture studio, OMA.

Prada S/S 2026: a ‘new elegance’ for a world in flux

Through the sea of orange came Prada’s women, who were adorned in pieces made to ‘shift, change [and] adapt’. Liberating garments from what Mrs Prada and Simons called their typical ‘hierarchies’, everyday uniforms were shuffled up with lustrously designed eveningwear, so that the matching military shirt and press-front trouser set that opened the show felt as easy as an opulent satin mini dress encrusted with black sequins, worn over casual Bermuda shorts with dusty pink opera gloves (‘a Prada uniform can occupy the same position as evening dress,’ read the collection notes).

Elsewhere, there was a re-exploration of the classic elements of a woman’s wardrobe – skirts were held up with straps that looped over the shoulder, while draped bra tops ‘had shape without structure’. The result was an unconventional, fluid kind of femininity – a ‘new elegance’ for a world in flux.

For Miuccia Prada, this radical new wardrobe is a direct reaction to the uncertain times we are living. ‘Inevitably, when we create we think about the world around us,’ she said. ‘The future is unknown. This collection is about reacting to the uncertain – clothes that can shift, change, adapt. In the combination of the different elements, in this idea of composition, there is a choice and freedom, authority and agency for the woman wearing them. It is fashion that is connected inherently to the world, with a meaning and usefulness. How to face the world, and how to survive.’

At the same time, Simons was considering ideas of freedom – not only in his craft as a designer, but also in equipping women with autonomy when it comes to ideas of dress. ‘We started from a sense of freedom – of expressing this through clothes,’ he says. ‘There is the license to combine different elements, to compose, and there is also a physical liberation, moving away from fashion as a sculptural imposition on the body of a woman. We shifted into the opposite – physical emancipation, but also freedom as a state of mind… Uniform is part of a Prada history – for us, there is the idea that a woman can be beautiful, elegant and strong in a uniform. It is a challenge, to a hierarchy of perception. To free women from this.’

Catch up on the highlights from Milan Fashion Week S/S 2026 so far here.

‘Alexander McQueen was all about the waistline,’ said Irish creative director Seán McGirr following his A/W 2025 collection for McQueen, which carved out the waist in dramatic fashion. It would be a trend that ran through the season: architectural tailoring was nipped at the waist or narrowed with wide-leather belts, suggesting not constriction but a new power silhouette (as such, it was often teamed with a wide shoulder, superhero-style). At Sarah Burton’s Givenchy debut, jackets were meticulously sculpted at the waistline (‘to cut, shape and proportion. It’s what I feel, how I work, and want to do,’ she said), while Kim Jones’ swansong at Dior Men looked towards the pinched-waist Bar Jacket for inspiration.

In keeping with this mood, the belt became the accessory of the season, with iterations at Prada, Jil Sander, Saint Laurent, Brioni and Sacai worn to reshape the body – whether over gowns or blazers, or cinching the waist of an overcoat. But the statement belt has been bubbling under for some time: at Miu Miu’s S/S 2025 show, looping and stacked-up chain belts were akin to strings of jewellery, while other designers – from Hodakova to August Barron and Craig Green – have created iterations that are studded, charm-adorned, painted with florals or furry to the touch. As such, they provide the perfect flourish to an otherwise simple outfit, channelling an au courant desire to adorn ourselves and our accessories (see: the unstoppable rise of the bag charm).

Here, as selected by the Wallpaper* style team, are ten statement-making belts to add drama to any outfit.

A wild, animalistic mood permeated the A/W 2025 collections, where a frenetic collage of clashing animal prints, slices of faux fur and shearling, and fronds of feathers suggested a need for escape and release. This was the starting point of the cover shoot for the September 2025 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, an exploration of the uninhibited, subversive glamour which ran through the season, where tropes of luxury were twisted, or turned on their head.

Photographed by Austrian image-maker Nicole Maria Winkler and styled by Wallpaper* fashion and creative director Jason Hughes, the shoot sees model Costanze Van Rosmalen – who made a memorable runway debut at Prada’s A/W 2025 show, titled ‘Raw Glamour’ – inhabit a surreal domestic scene, a hallmark of Winkler’s work (for Wallpaper’s March 2025 Style Issue, she created a liminal apartment complete with disorientating trompe l’oeil wall coverings, part of an ongoing collaboration with set designer Kim Harding).

‘What I find exciting is creating deconstructed settings which emphasise the model’s performance for the camera. It doesn’t feel like her natural habitat but a constructed scene,’ she says. ‘In this instance, the double-height stage resembled a domestic set-up – a living room complete with sofa and TV and a bed on top. In another setup our model Constanze casually speed-walked on a treadmill wearing thigh-high Acne Studios boots – one of my favourite moments.’

‘Faux animal furs and reptile skins were really prevalent this season,’ adds Hughes. ‘For this shoot, I liked this idea of clashing them to create these surreal hybrid combinations, layered up in a single look. They are also textures synonymous with traditional glamour and luxury – we wanted to play with them to create a modern way of dressing up.’

Explore the shoot below.

The September 2025 issue of Wallpaper* is available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

An imagined meeting between photographer Robert Mapplethorpe and couturier Yves Saint Laurent – two men responsible for honing the aesthetic of the 1980s – provided the inspiration for Anthony Vaccarello’s A/W 2025 menswear collection for Saint Laurent, presented in the Tadao Ando-designed rotunda of Paris’ Bourse de Commerce earlier this year. Hanging chandeliers – lowered to just a few feet from the floor – lent the space a moody half-light, inspired by those which hung in the ballroom of Paris’ Intercontinental Hotel, where Yves Saint Laurent held his couture shows from 1976 onwards.

Out of the darkness emerged his protagonist for the season: part-Yves Saint Laurent in ‘bookish’ houndstooth and flannel tailoring, a recreation of his distinctive Parisian uniform, part-Mapplethorpe in the thigh-high leather boots worn atop, inflected with the suggestion of kink that ran through his photographic oeuvre (Mapplethorpe remains best-known for his homoerotic male nudes, which often featured elements of fetish and BDSM-wear, from leather boots, chaps and harnesses to gimp masks and latex). Vaccarello described the collection as capturing ‘a menacing, seductive elegance’, further figured in hefty leather overcoats and flourishes of ‘fur’ (in fact, these pieces were constructed from thousands of meticulously placed feathers).

Dangerous elegance: A/W 2025’s new menswear mood

This feeling of ‘menacing elegance’ ran through the season, with 1980s-inflected designs capturing a mood of dangerous sensuality through moments of leather, denim and western-wear, often clashed with classical tailoring or corporate attire. At MM6 Maison Margiela, tasselled leather gilets and pants looked to have stepped out of a Karlheinz Weinberger photograph; at Versace, slick leather tailoring was worn with silk shirts adorned with animal prints and baroque motifs; while at Prada, an influence of western-wear came in cowboy boots tweaked upwards at the toe, and tailoring made from a patchwork of leather. Playing out amid a scaffold show set designed to evoke the intimacy of a nightclub, co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons called it a collection of ‘instinct and passion’.

Here, taken from the cover shoot of the September 2025 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, a series of these looks is captured by French photographic duo Melanie + Ramon and Wallpaper* fashion and creative director Jason Hughes. Together, they encapsulate the A/W 2025’s dangerous, sensual mood – an invitation to embrace a sense of risk when dressing for the season ahead. Our short film of the shoot, above, plays out to the voice of a young Marlon Brando, as recorded in an early screentest for Rebel Without a Cause (the part later went to James Dean).

Model: Colin O at Tomorrow Is Another Day. Casting: Noah Shelley at Streeters. Hair/grooming: Michael Harding at Blend Management using Davines. Digi tech: Grzegorz Stefanski. Photography assistants: Joe Conway, Jason Colledge. Fashion assistant: Anna Sweasey. Production assistant: Danielle Quigley. Retouching: Courtoisie.

A version of this story appears in the September 2025 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Dare to write off brown as drab at your folly. Its very majesty is in its sedate unobviousness and its warm earthiness. The fact that its charm can be found in a tree trunk, a Marni fringed sandal or a chocolate-coloured gown worn by Tilda Swinton in the 2018 remake of Suspiria underlines its breadth of character.

Sure, it’s a beauty that is definitely in the eye of the beholder. Miuccia Prada sent out an infamous women’s collection for S/S 1996 that featured murky browns often credited as the beginning of fashion’s love for ‘ugly chic’. ‘The colour of water as it stagnates over a long, steamy summer’, was how one critic summarised the situation at the time.

The designer has since made brown a recurrent theme in her own wardrobe and Prada collections. The A/W 2025 menswear show opened with a caramel brown, short-sleeve knit with jewellery punched into it, worn with chocolate-hued tailored trousers. In June, the brand’s 2026 take on short-shorts for men was duly paraded around Fondazione Prada in a wondrous deep coffee.

The colour brown: fashion’s most underrated hue

Brown is also a bit queer, a bit avant-garde. The American writer Gertrude Stein was a fan of brown velvet, in particular, a 1946 two-piece skirt suit designed by Pierre Balmain. In a 1894 oil painting by Roger Fry, the early gay rights activist Edward Carpenter wears a brown coat, which Fry described in a letter as Carpenter’s ‘anarchist overcoat’.

In fashion, Prada is not alone. Brown is a total mood. An Hermès duffle coat in a glossy taupe looks particularly desirable styled with beige and black. The Row’s dark mahogany suit blazers or cashmere overcoats, paired with round-toe lace-ups in coordinating shades, are autumnal catnip. Meanwhile, for next spring, Saint Laurent’s tailored shorts in a soft brown – inspired by a pair Yves Saint Laurent wore in 1950 – were styled on the runway with an orangey-red shirt, a gentle reminder that brown is a brilliant neutral, and works gorgeously with a strong colour.

Fall for the charms of brown and its appeal swells; its appearances multiply. A recent exhibition by Julien Nguyen at Matthew Marks featured a painting of his muse Nikos in a brown coat, the shade of which gloriously offsets pale skin and yellow-blond hair. And at Rick Owens’ ‘Temple of Love’ retrospective, currently on at Paris’ Palais Galliera, you’ll note there are plenty of clothes on the brown spectrum, and that, yes, the gallery’s floor-to-ceiling curtains do come in a slash of elegant brown brushed velvet.

A version of this story appears in the September 2025 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

An interrogation of femininity has been a part of the Prada project since Miuccia Prada took over the family label in 1978. Her collections have taken the trappings of womanhood and skewed them – handbags and high-heeled shoes, brooches and beehives – each loaded with symbolism and, in her hands, ripe for reinvention. It’s been the same with archetypes, too: flapper girls and businesswomen, nurses, brides and Cinecittà sirens, the fastidiously dressed women of the Italian bourgeoisie – all have received the Prada treatment, which is at once intellectual and impulsive. She has spoken of her love of clichés – in these well-worn tropes, Mrs Prada has long seen only possibility: to make the ugly beautiful, and the beautiful ugly, that most Prada of gestures.

‘Raw Glamour’ was the title given by Mrs Prada and her co-creative director Raf Simons to their A/W 2025 collection for Prada, presented in February amid an imposing multi-level scaffold structure erected by OMA in Fondazione Prada’s hangar-like Deposito space in Milan. Here, as models traversed the maze-like show set at speed – hair dishevelled, faces stripped of make-up – there appeared new urgency to the project.

Dressing for pleasure: A/W 2025’s subversive glamour

‘We asked ourselves, what is femininity today? It is a constant questioning,’ said Mrs Prada, noting that the world was entering ‘a very black moment... a difficult time’. ‘It is not my job to be political, but when you open a newspaper – oh my God! Our job is to think about what clothes a woman can wear, about what kind of femininity makes sense in this moment.’

It led the pair to radically rewrite and recontextualise the tropes of glamour. Much of this was done through proportion – the nipped, ladylike contours of 1960s dresses were sized up so they hung off models’ bodies or torn away at their edges, almost violently. ‘The idea of feminine beauty is often about constricting movement, so we wanted these clothes to be about liberation. Which is about fashion, but it is not just about fashion,’ said Simons. ‘Glamour was something we were attracted to, instinctively,’ added Mrs Prada, who envisioned ‘fur’ coats that erupted into strange protrusions at the collar (the ‘fur’ was actually dyed shearling); pointed, high-heeled pumps left raw at the seams; queasy floral prints that suggested 1960s curtains and upholstery; and blouses in-set with creases, while bows, charms and buttons served as girlish adornment. The effect was immediate and electrifying; a glamour released from perfection and constriction, a femininity for our times.

Raw glamour could well have been the byline of the A/W25 season. Fur coats, blouses, bullet bras, brooches, crimson-red lips – everywhere was a heady, perfume- scented whiff of feminine glamour, its well-worn motifs ricocheted into the now. Women prowled a simulacrum of a red-walled public toilet at Valentino (in sickly-sweet layers of lace, ruffles and bows, to a soundtrack by Lana Del Rey, herself a master of disruptive feminine glamour); at Acne Studios, leggy Helmut Newton-esque glamazons clashed with the cocooning dress codes of the wilds of northern Sweden (the enormous faux fur coats and boots were inspired by teddy bears); while at Marni, in what was Francesco Risso’s final collection for the house, a heady take on the salon show saw models wander through a hand-drawn imagining of a Milanese café in colourful faux furs, patchwork silk dresses and giant floral corsages. Risso had worked with the Nigerian artists Slawn and Soldier throughout the process of designing the collection in a kind of shared creative studio. ‘It was such an intense and freeing experience,’ says Risso. ‘I wanted the art to pervade everything and for people to feel like they could get drunk on these clothes.’

At Fendi, a collection of irreverent Roman glamour saw ‘fur’ coats constructed from shearling, which was then painstakingly dyed to look like fox, mink or sable. Silvia Venturini Fendi likened it to how her mother and aunts had revolutionised Fendi a generation before by stripping fur coats of their linings or turning them inside out – a provocative act at the time – which spoke to the changing needs of a woman’s wardrobe. ‘They were considered crazy to try and demolish a status symbol,’ she said, noting the nonchalant way in which women treated furs at the time as the ultimate expression of glamour, whether slinging them over the back of a chair or allowing stoles to drag along the floor behind them. ‘It was from them that I learned to appreciate the value of ideas, more than the real economic value of things.’

And at Miu Miu, Mrs Prada’s conundrums continued with a collection she described as ‘an evaluation of the feminine’. For the occasion, the Palais d’Iéna was wrapped in yellow-green moiré, while the collection featured brooches, stoles and bullet bra tops (inspired by the 1950s bombshell, they were sharply pointed at the chest). Meanwhile, a longtime fascination with the Italian bourgeoisie – particularly that of her native Milan – appeared in a mood of dishevelled decadence, from skewiff beehives and crumpled ribbed stockings to mannish overcoats, strangely folded at the chest and slumped along the shoulder line.

‘The typical accessories of femininity: the bra, the brooches, the fur. The question is, what do we retain of femininity? Does it help in this really dangerous moment?’ said Mrs Prada after the show. Her inquisitions were in part rhetorical: she knows that to search for answers for the world’s ills in clothing will always be futile. Instead, this was about a kind of reclamation: she spoke about these elements of glamour becoming ‘bold and powerful’, stripped of cliché but not of appeal.

Here, we present a series of the season’s looks that interrogate such notions of glamour. They are captured on a grand staircase, a location commonly used in film and literature for sweeping entrances and dramatic departures. Is our protagonist descending or ascending? Is she entering the room or leaving it? Is she alone or being watched? And if she is, how will she be seen? In Alfred Hitchcock’s film Rebecca (based on the novel by Daphne du Maurier), the narrator’s descent down the staircase at Manderley prefaces a moment of terror: the realisation that she has, unwittingly, dressed in the same gown as Rebecca de Winter, her husband’s late wife and thus a symbol of her own inadequacy. Admonished by her husband, the brooding Maxim de Winter, her face shifts from the pleasure of dressing up to a realisation of how such clothing – here, a corseted white gown adorned with flowers and layers of lace and tulle – is writ with connotations and, when hifted in context, can become a weapon.

Each of these A/W25 looks delight in such contradictions, capturing both glamour’s undeniable seductive appeal – a base desire to dress up, to adorn oneself – as well as its power to disrupt and confront. ‘To me, glamour is not a sexy dress – it’s the opposite,’ elucidated Mrs Prada after the Prada show in Milan. ‘It’s an interior point of view. Glamour is about feeling important.’

A version of this story appears in the September 2025 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

Themes of glamour, danger and seduction ran through the A/W 2025 collections – from Saint Laurent’s thigh-high leather boots to ‘fur’ coats, animal prints and sculpted tailoring. As seen in the September 2025 Style Issue of Wallpaper* (on newsstands now), we capture the season’s sensual new mood in 12 objects and looks for men and women.

Power trip (top left)

Tropes of glamour – from bullet bras and brooches to red lips and fur coats – were riffed on by designers in unexpected and imaginative ways. At Alaïa, towering shearling ‘fur’ coats looped around models’ necklines and tassels jutted from skirt waistlines, while vast corsages sat flush to the neck. ‘The message is about singularity, individuality, the eternal strength and resilience of women, empowering them through their clothes,’ said creative director Pieter Mulier. ‘That inspired Azzedine, and it always inspires me – the strength of beauty.’

Thigh high (top right)

An imagined meeting between Robert Mapplethorpe and Yves Saint Laurent sparked Anthony Vaccarello’s menswear collection for Saint Laurent. Clashing the carnal desires of Mapplethorpe’s photography with the ‘bookish’ classicism of Yves Saint Laurent’s Parisian uniform, it was defined by thigh-grazing leather boots worn with 1980s-inspired tailoring. Referencing a ‘Robin Hood’ boot created by Yves Saint Laurent in 1963, they were perhaps the season’s most talked-about accessory, finding fans in Alexander Skarsgård and Pedro Pascal.

Buffer zone

The proliferation of faux fur – or fur reproductions in cleverly manipulated feathers or dyed shearling – suggested a desire for protection, whether against the elements or something more existential. Enveloping ‘yeti’ coats were most appealing in their hefty weight and size, from those at Dolce & Gabbana – evoking the thrown-on style of off-duty models – to Sportmax’s shaggy monochromatic overcoats. ‘Hyper-reinvention – where the ordinary becomes extraordinary,’ said the Italian label of the collection.

Swan song

After a five-year tenure, Kim Jones held his closing act as artistic director of Dior menswear amid a dramatic monochromatic mişe-en-scene that saw models descend an enormous optic white staircase and onto the runway – a play on the staircase at the house’s Avenue Montaigne address. Silhouettes took inspiration from the streamlined proportions of Christian Dior’s 1954 H-Line couture collection, while ribbon-like eye masks were tied at the back with a bow, evoking those found on the bottles of the Miss Dior fragrance.

Magic eye

Awaiting the arrival of incoming creative director Matthieu Blazy, Chanel has used recent collections to reinforce its most distinctive codes. For A/W 2025, it did so through a collection designed to ‘alter perceptions’, reimagining Chanel emblems using tricks of the eye – whether trompe l’oeil bows or a series of surreal accessories blown up in size or shrunk into miniature. These included a huge version of its signature pochette, a tiny quilted handbag, and this Borrowers-style string of pearls, one of which flips open to make a bag.

Dark arts

‘A menacing elegance’ is how Anthony Vaccarello defined the mood of his menswear collection for Saint Laurent, with its sense of danger, inflected with hints of kink. There was also Prada’s patchworked leather tailoring and raw slices of shearling ‘fur’; Lemaire’s leather foulards, worn as headscarves; and elongated trench coats and leather gloves at Ferragamo. The latter was presented by Maximilian Davis on a darkened runway strewn with red roses, a nod to the sensual staging of Pina Bausch’s Nelken, performed by the Tanztheater Wuppertal.

Wild ones

Designers embraced a wilder side this season, with Duran Lantink’s collection sporting a heady collage of zebra, leopard and tiger prints, some painted directly on to the models’ bodies, while Peter Copping’s Lanvin debut – an ode to the louche 1920s eveningwear of founder Jeanne Lanvin – featured oversized leopard-print coats with a soft, shaggy finish. At Sacai, Chitose Abe looked towards more fantastical realms, conjuring up the monsters of Maurice Sendak’s Where the Wild Things Are with brightly coloured flourishes of dyed shearling.

Hat trick

The hat is having something of a renaissance, appearing in various guises on recent runways. Signalling a move beyond the casual spirit of a cap or beanie, designers instead delighted in the nostalgic elegance of more classic millinery. At Sportmax, it was something between a pillbox and a panama, at Duran Lantink, there were amped-up versions of the trapper and woolly hats in his signature sculpted form, while Loro Piana featured a play on the cloche hat, a style synonymous with the liberatory dress codes of the 1920s.

Pump action

The pointed, heeled pump has been an archetype of femininity since its rise to prominence in the 1930s, a moment that coincided with the growing influence of Hollywood. Interpretations of the pump appeared throughout the collections, though it was those at Prada that proved most intriguing, featuring raw-cut edges as a riposte to perfection. Co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons noted it was part of an interrogation of femininity. ‘We asked ourselves, what is feminine beauty?’ said Mrs Prada. ‘It is a constant questioning.’

Carry all

This was the season of the XXL bag, perfect for transporting the necessities of contemporary life. Hermès offered up a new take on its ‘Haut à Courroies’ bag, which, in its roominess, can double as a weekend bag or plane carry-on. Stripped of the usual hardware, the various straps and clasps were replaced with ghostly embossing, as if a trace of what was there had been left behind. It came as part of a collection that artistic director Véronique Nichanian described as ‘a play between front and back, inside and out, visible and invisible’.

Body work

Stella McCartney staged her show at the ‘Stellacorp’ HQ – a surreal simulacrum of an office, complete with spinning chairs and desks, which was eventually invaded by underwear-clad pole dancers. Titled ‘Laptop to Lapdance’, playful juxtapositions ran through the collection, which saw the corporate uniform, from pencil skirts to blouses, shot through with a frisson of perversity. Collections from Acne Studios, Balenciaga and All-In presented similar riffs on office attire, the latter inspired by Mike Nichols’ 1988 movie Working Girl.

Take shape

Men’s tailoring this season was sculpted in silhouette, with a focus on the waist. Kim Jones’ final collection for Dior Men included a tuxedo-style riff on Christian Dior’s Bar jacket, while at Wooyoungmi, a reconsideration of eveningwear saw a carved waistline on a jacket adorned with 3D-appliqué flowers. Madame Woo, who staged the show in the opulent surrounds of Karl Lagerfeld’s former residence on Rue de l’Université, said she was thinking about ‘ideas of proper dressing’, reimagining formalwear in louche and sensual style.

Models: Hollie-May Saker at Models 1, Tristan Watkins at Menace Models. Casting: Dean Goodman. Hair: Anna Chapman at Julian Watson using Bumble and Bumble. Make-up: Kirstin Piggott at Julian Watson using Charlotte Tilbury. Manicure: Hayley Evans-Smith at Saint Luke using Byredo. Interiors: Olly Mason. Digi tech: Laura Heckford. Photography assistants: Tom Porter, Ed Philips. Fashion assistant: Lucy Proctor. Interiors coordinator: Archie Thomson. Production: Victoria Watkins at Birdhouse. Production assistant: Melina Grace Bryant. Retouching: Aly Studio.

A version of this story appears in the September 2025 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

The Prada show is always one of the most anticipated events of Milan Fashion Week. And, while the clothes take centre stage, much of the excitement is down to the set. Since 2018, the shows have been staged inside the hangar-like Deposito space at Fondazione Prada – a vast blank slate that’s set the scene for all manner of transformative world-building. Slime has dripped from ceilings onto sci-fi metal floors, a gigantic paper house turned guests into dolls in a playhouse, and last season, a dimly lit scaffolding structure had the distinct feeling of a rave. But for S/S 2026, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons seemed to declare: let there be light.

Revealing the usually hidden windows of the Deposito, the showspace was flooded with airy brightness – a stark contrast to the heavy, multi-storey structure of A/W 2025 – and guests were able to take in its raw, industrial beauty. The set was designed by the Rotterdam-based architecture studio OMA, led by Rem Koolhaas. The Milanese house has collaborated with the studio for over 25 years – a partnership that began in 1999, when Prada approached OMA to design its New York store on Broadway. The stark wooden steps down into the store, and its swooping manipulation of scale, have since become one of fashion retail’s most memorable statements.

‘Sometimes it’s good to reflect and be a little bit more calm’: Prada’s pared-back show set for men’s S/S 2026

Keeping things simple this season, only a handful of fluffy, flower-shaped carpets scattered across the floor – evoking vintage 1970s prints – gave anything away about the collection. Sheds of furry hair clung to guests’ shoes before they sat down to watch the show unfold, while KLF’s ambient 1990 album Chill Out, layered with the chirps of birdsong, played overhead. The clothes themselves were about ‘a shift of attitude – dismantling of meaning, and dismantling power’, said the brand in a statement.

In practice, this meant a surreal escapism, with clothing spanning micro-shorts, as if pulled upwards at the hemline, colourful raffia hats and tabard-style tops adorned with floral print. There were also tracksuits, shrunken in size and recalling sportswear of the 1970s. Accessories had a feeling of functionality, like a series of backpacks, bumbags and duffels, grasped by models in the hand, while other clothing riffed on masculine archetypes – from the double-breasted suit to military attire.

‘This is the first time the Fondazione is completely bare, with the light coming in,’ said Raf Simons backstage. When asked what prompted the change, Miuccia Prada added, ‘It’s out there. You feel it,’ no doubt referencing the unstable times in which we are living. ‘We wanted to show something in this moment that, hopefully, feels positive and balanced,’ Simons continued. ‘Sometimes it's good to reflect and be a little bit more calm.’

This lightness, the designer says, made the collection the easiest he has ever worked on in his career. ‘Often you have a very specific architectural proposition, a shape, a shoulder, a waist,’ he said. ‘From the start we said we don’t want that. We want everything to be human. We want everything to be light, fresh and colourful. When we started working, it was the easiest collection I have ever done. It's very free.’

prada.com

Read live updates from Milan Fashion Week Men’s S/S 2026 and the standout shows of the season so far here

After a smattering of off-schedule shows in London this past weekend, including outings from Martine Rose and Charles Jeffrey Loverboy, Men’s Fashion Week S/S 2026 officially commences today in Florence (17 June 2025) with the opening of the 108th edition of the city’s historic menswear fair. In surging mid-30s heat, this season’s guest shows will include a no-doubt colourful outing from Homme Plissé Issey Miyake at Villa Medicea della Petraia on the slopes of Monte Morello on Wednesday evening, before eyes turn to Milan on Friday, seeing the latest collections from Prada, Giorgio Armani and Dolce & Gabbana shown amid a slew of presentations, showrooms and (much-needed) aperitivo.

The final stop is Paris, where – despite a packed six-day-long schedule – it is Jonathan Anderson’s debut show for Dior which will absorb the fashion world’s attention (the former Loewe creative director is now overseeing Dior’s menswear, womenswear and haute couture). Indeed, when the Wallpaper* style editors and contributors were straw-polled on what they were most looking forward to this menswear month, everyone put his inaugural collection for the Parisian house at the top of their list. But there was plenty more – read on for everything the Wallpaper* editors are looking forward to at Men’s Fashion Week S/S 2026.

Men’s Fashion Week S/S 2026: what the Wallpaper* editors are looking forward to

Jason Hughes, fashion and creative director

Like most people in fashion, I’m most looking forward to Jonathan Anderson’s debut at Dior on the Friday of Paris Fashion Week – I was a big fan of his work at Loewe, where he created such a universe around his clothing. I own a lot of pieces he designed there, so I’m excited to see what he has in store. If it’s anything like his work at Loewe – or indeed his work at eponymous London label JW Anderson – it will shift the fashion needle, and have us all wanting something new.

In Milan, it's all about Prada: you can always expect the unexpected from Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, from the show set – which in recent seasons has included dripping goo, sci-fi tunnels and surreal officescapes – to the clothes themselves. Elsewhere, I've been impressed by London-based designer Kiko Kostadinov in the last couple of seasons. His idiosyncratic approach to pattern cutting and colour always veers towards the strange, in the best possible way. He’s showing his latest menswear collection on the final Sunday of Paris, closing out Men’s Fashion Month.

Jack Moss, fashion features editor

One of my highlights has actually already happened: a surprise off-schedule show from British designer Martine Rose this weekend in London, held among a maze of ruffled boudoir curtains in an empty job centre close to west London’s Edgware Road (on a lower floor, Rose had curated a market from her creative community of designers, record sellers and magazine publishers). Befitting the show set (‘our version of a salon’), Rose said that the collection was about finding beauty in the unexpected, seeing her trademark underground style (queer and cruising culture have been a longtime reference) softened with flourishes of lace, satin and silk, while silhouettes were shrunken to the body. ‘Everything feels a bit cinched or too tight, a bit awkward but still sexy, I hope,’ she said after the show, tequila already in hand. It was. Weird, sexy, desirable, and entirely on her own terms, it was my favourite collection of hers in some time.

Elsewhere, I'm of course excited for Jonathan Anderson’s Dior debut (who isn’t?), while in Milan I join Jason in looking forward to Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’ latest vision for Prada menswear (as ever, it will likely set the tone for the season ahead). An on-schedule Saint Laurent menswear show, on the opening day of Paris Fashion Week, is also on my highlights list, as is a duo of exhibition openings (also in Paris) from two of the city’s boundary-pushing designers: Demna, who will stage a retrospective of his work at Balenciaga prior to leaving for Gucci next month, and Rick Owens’ ‘Temple of Love’ exhibition, which opens at the Palais Galliera on June 28.

Scarlett Conlon, Milan contributor

The big reveal that I’m most looking forward to is, of course, Jonathan Anderson at Dior during the Paris leg of the shows. I’m fascinated to see how he brings the idiosyncratic charm that he has carved out a niche in to the storied French maison.

Elsewhere, with presentations outnumbering shows in Milan, I always love the opportunity that menswear provides to get up and close with the sartorial expertise of the clothes and talk with the designers; Brioni, Tod’s, and Brunello Cucinelli are always highlights, each finding new ways to make their super luxe offering feel relevant and fresh (and I’d be lying if I said I hadn’t already planned what time I’ll be at the famous parmesan wheel at the latter).

Orla Brennan, contributing fashion writer

Besides seeing what Jonathan Anderson will do with his first collection for Dior – a moment we are all very excited about – I’m most looking forward to Prada. If Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’ last few shows are anything to go by, I predict an intriguing show set and cast of interesting (possibly celebrity) characters coming down the runway – plus, of course, their usual agenda-setting fashion, guaranteed to shift what we find desirable.

I’m also looking forward to Wales Bonner’s return to the Paris Fashion Week schedule. The brand isn’t known for big spectacles, but the stories, music and clothes are always so clever and soulful – a testament to the eponymous designer’s superlative world-building ability.

Read the full Men’s Fashion Week S/S 2026 preview here.

In 2019, the micro-sized version of Jacquemus’ ‘Le Chiquito’ bag – so small it could fit into the palm of your hand with proportions less than the size of a credit card – briefly became a viral sensation, dangled from the fingertips of celebrities and influencers, the protagonist of many a street-style photograph. It captured a mood for the miniature which had defined accessories of the late 2010s – a playful riposte to the hefty and unwieldy handbags of a previous generation, with the understanding that all you really needed to carry was your phone.

Half a decade on, the demands of contemporary life have shifted thanks to the pandemic: now, our bags have become vessels for hybrid working, hauling laptops, chargers, papers, gym kits and the various accoutrements of workplace life between office and home (and back again). It’s why the XXL bag has replaced the micro, ushering in a generous new class of oversized shoppers, carry-alls and totes – from Loewe’s ‘Puzzle’ tote and Prada’s ‘Buckle’ bag, to the resurgence of the Hermès Birkin, which was originally designed to cater to the lifestyle of its namesake, actress and singer Jane Birkin, after a chance encounter with Jean-Louis Dumas, the former chairman of Hermès, on flight (as a young mother, she had struggled to find a leather bag large enough for her belongings).

It’s why the XXL tote also doubles as a reliable travel companion – with an easily accessed top opening and spacious interior, it makes navigating trips through airport departures or cross-country train journeys simple (and, for the over-packer, can carry more than you will probably ever need). In time for such escapes, the Wallpaper* style team has collated ten of the best supersized totes and shoppers – from the slouchy and nostalgic to the playfully surreal.

Ten of the best supersized tote bags and shoppers

Summer is a time for living with abandon; for freeing yourself from quotidian routines and making straight for the nearest beach. Dressing for the season should be approached with a similarly liberatory spirit: the heat of summer calls for embracing your instincts for the playful and the brightly hued, a more is more aesthetic befitting a mood of escapism, where, for a tantalising brief few months, you can reveal a whole different side of yourself (both metaphorically, and, for the brave, physically).

As seen in the Wallpaper* June Travel issue, Bulgaria-born, London-based photographer Irina Shestakova and Wallpaper* fashion and creative director Jason Hughes capture this spirit of playful abandon, proposing a pile-up of accessories that look best on the beach. From raffia totes, bag charms and candy-like strings of necklaces to barely-there swim trunks and fluoro T-shirts – as well as bikes and snorkels – this is our directive to let go this summer, and give into your desire for escape.

Explore the story below.

Splash out! This summer’s best accessories

Models: Mia and Tsion at Next, Nikita, Adam and Eden at IMG, Chanula at Milk. Casting: Nico at Ikki Casting Hair: Christos Bairabas. Make-up: Victoria Martin using Haus Labs. Manicure: Olivia Gane using Chanel Le Vernis and Chanel La Crème Main. Photography assistants: Federico Covarelli and Sam Sorabjee. Fashion assistant: Lucy Proctor Hair assistant: Malita Nagelyte. Production assistant: Archie Thomson.

A version of this article appears in the June 2025 Travel Issue of Wallpaper*, available in print, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

It wasn’t so long ago that the sign of a covetable sneaker was its relative heft, perhaps best epitomised by the Balenciaga ‘Triple X’, a shoe so weighty that each step proved a workout. And, while the supersized sneaker remains ubiquitous – Balenciaga recently added the ‘3XL’ to its roster, and Marni’s collaboration with Hoka was blown-up like a cushion – there has been a shift towards the narrower, slimmer low-pro trainer, defined by its knife-thin sole and lightweight construction.

The ten best low-pro sneakers for men and women

Case in point: the rise of Adidas Original’s ‘Tokyo’ and ‘Taekwondo’ sneakers, the latter originally designed for martial arts in the 2000s, which in their razor-slim design are beginning to compete with the prevalence of the ‘Samba’ (the latter’s renaissance in 2023 was perhaps a pre-cursor to the low-pro trend). On the runway, Prada’s ‘Collapse’ sneaker first appeared as part of a S/S 2025 menswear show which co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons described as capturing a mood of ‘freedom, youthful optimism and energy’ – a mood reflected in the colourful footwear, which had the appearance of being flattened through wear. At sister brand Miu Miu, the ‘Gymnasium’ sneaker was its girlish equivalent (there, Mrs Prada talked about the ‘simplicity’ and ‘clarity’ of adolescence).

Here, the Wallpaper* style team selects its ten favourite low-pro sneakers for men and women, from Abra’s surreal ballerina slipper-sneaker hybrid to colourful 1970s-inspired styles from Adidas, Miu Miu, Prada, Nike and more.

Milan Design Week 2025 saw the fashion contingent put on its most comprehensive showing at the design fair to date, taking up residence in some of the city’s storied landmarks to do so.

From Gucci’s ‘Bamboo Encounters’ staged in the cloisters of San Simpliciano and Aesop’s ‘The Second Skin’ exhibition in the sacristy of the Chiesa del Carmine, to Loewe at the Palazzo Citterio and Prada Frames taking over the iconic Milano Centrale station, the showcase proved a heady melting pot of sensorial immersions and design collaborations.

Here, Scarlett Conlon highlights the standout fashion moments of Salone del Mobile and Milan Design Week 2025 – from Loewe’s playful artist-designed teapots to a blockbuster Charlotte Perriand exhibition from Saint Laurent.

Georg Jensen’s ‘Gelateria Danese’

Danish design house Georg Jensen provided Milan Design Week’s most palatable pit stop: Gelateria Danese, an ephemeral ice cream parlour that drew inspiration from the interiors of Copenhagen’s Palace Hotel (opened in 1910, Georg Jensen provided furnishings and silverware) while referencing Milanese café culture. On the menu was traditional affogato (coffee was sourced from local roastery Prolog), while an array of ice cream flavours were dreamed up by Copenhagen-based Italian chef Chiara Barla. Each was served on Georg Jensen silverware, from coupes to tub-shaped cups, as well as spoons taken from ‘The Artisans Series’. ‘You’ll find pieces you’d typically associate with ice cream, but instead of being disposable, they’re crafted in silver,’ said recently appointed creative director Paula Gerbase. ‘Not only creating durable objects, but elevating the fleeting moments we use them in.’

The Row’s first homeware offering

In signature understated style, The Row launched ‘Home’ at Salone. Comprising a collection of three handwoven throws and a quilted blanket, the Olsens’ first foray into luxury home design was presented elegantly draped over steel and bronze rails by Julian Schnabel in the frescoed rooms of what will shortly become the New York-based brand’s Milanese HQ. Created with artisans in Kashmir, India, each blanket takes between 600 hours to craft and employs a different weaving technique from which they take their name: the Classic, The Row Weave, and the Himalayan Weave, arriving in four colourways – mink, ivory, brown and black. Lightweight at less than 14.5 microns and discreetly embroidered with the brand’s initials, they stand to become one of the year’s most coveted IYKYK home improvements.

Prada Frames boards a restored Gio Ponti train

As the city’s most majestic portal, Milano Centrale station proved the perfect location for the fourth edition of Prada Frames, ‘In Transit’. The annual event curated by Formafantasma that invites panellists from all areas of design, including architecture, engineering and environmental planning, into thematic dialogue has become one of the most popular attractions at Design Week, taking place in iconic landmarks around the city. This year, attendees were invited into the station’s Padiglione Reale that once served as the waiting room for Italian royalty and heads of state before boarding the Arlecchino train designed by Gio Ponti and Giulio Minoletti in the 1950s and recently restored by the Fondazione FS Italiane (out of the entire original fleet, this was the only one viable to be brought back to its former glory). Over the course of the week, discussions on digital, global, material and hacking infrastructures, along with interrogations of infrastructures of power, played out on board, seeking to examine ‘the impact of digital revolutions and global distribution networks on daily life’. Once again brilliantly introduced and contextualised by Alice Rawsthorn, several key takeaways included the necessity for infrastructure to collaborate rather than colonise, integrating ancestral knowledge to reframe industrial design, and the urgent need to re-evaluate industrial infrastructures to work in conjunction with the natural world rather than see them as separate entities.

READ: Aboard Gio Ponti's colourful Arlecchino train in Milan, a conversation about design with Formafantasma

Stone Island’s ‘sonic experience’

Stone Island invited visitors to its ‘sonic experience’ called ‘Friendly Pressure: Studio One’, staged in collaboration with Friendly Pressure, the London-based sound system studio founded by Shivas Howard Brown. A study of the textures of sound, the week-long programme of events took place in spaces that had bespoke hi-fidelity audio systems installed by Friendly Pressure in direct response to the precise dimensions of the space to rouse emotions akin to ‘the golden age of recorded music, treating sound as both a sensory and physical experience,’ the brand relayed. Studio One, where the events took place, was inspired by Carlo Scarpa, while inside soundproofing by Soundwave Jasmine and CC-Tapis rugs ensured the desired sound dispersion. Mirroring Stone Island’s sartorial approach to how materials respond to their environment, an allegorical experience emerged, parallelling reactions to touch and sound.

Louis Vuitton’s latest Objets Nomades series

Louis Vuitton revealed its 2025 home collection by staging a takeover of the neoclassical residence of Palazzo Serbelloni in the centre of Milan alongside its Objets Nomades series. Featuring designs from leading artists that the Paris fashion house has collaborated with over the years – including Patricia Urquiola, Jaime Hayon and Atelier Biagetti – it drew special attention to the work of futurist artist Fortunato Depero and Charlotte Perriand, whose textile work for the house was realised for the first time. Elsewhere, a special-edition trunk celebrating the house’s original design icon, the Malle Vaisselier, opened to reveal a service of refined porcelain and delicate glasses. It was the more whimsical items on display that drew the most attention: the Odyssée table football and a pinball machine inspired by the A/W 2025 fashion show by creative director Pharrell Williams were designed for Studio Louis Vuitton by Estúdio Campana and balanced the splendour with a cheeky wink.

Miu Miu’s ‘Literary Club’

The doors to The Miu Miu Literary Club opened once again during Salone, inviting guests into the Circolo Filologico Milanese that had been given a modernist Miu Miu makeover. Conceived under the direction of Miuccia Prada and curated by writer and researcher Olga Campofreda, the theme for this year was ‘A Woman’s Education’ and saw two days of panel discussions exploring the subjects of girlhood, love and sex education through the pages of Simone de Beauvoir’s 1954 coming-of-age novella ‘The Inseparables’ and Fumiko Enchi’s groundbreaking 1957 novel charting female desire, ‘The Waiting Years’. On day one, author Lou Stoppard moderated a panel discussion exploring ‘the power of girlhood’ in the context of De Beauvoir’s work with Lauren Elkin, Geetanjali Shree, and Veronica Raimo, and on day two Kai Isaiah Jamal delved into Enchi’s with through the lens of ‘love, sex, and desire’ with Nicola Dinan, Naoise Dolan, and Sarah Manguso, both championing the voices of female literary voices past, present and future.

Valextra’s ‘travelling sculpture’ with Zaven

Milanese leather goods brand Valextra is famed for sitting at the intersection of fashion and design with an archive dating back to 1937 that includes collaborations with AG Fronzoni and the first Compasso D’Oro award. For its Salone project this year, it continued its Vocabulario Project, inviting the Venice-based design studio Zaven to work with one of its most famous creations from the last century and recontextualise it through an idiosyncratic lens. The result is the ‘Costa 70 x Zaven’ suitcase, an identical re-creation of the Giovanni Fontana-designed luggage that dates back to the 1960s filled with a series of abstract resin objects that Zaven designed to be engineered into a build-it-yourself home sculpture. ‘Responsive and thought-provoking design has been at the core of Valextra’s DNA since 1937 and Zaven mirrors our own passion in realising objects of excellence in both a functional and meaningful way with this exceptional reinvention of an archival icon,’ says Valextra CEO Xavier Rougeaux.

READ: Valextra’s collaboration with Zaven is a ‘travelling sculpture’ with its own suitcase

Brioni bottles a rare fragrance with Lalique

If time is regarded as one of the greatest luxuries, then Brioni bottled it for Salone. A project four years in the making was unveiled at its Via Gesu flagship to mark Brioni’s 80th anniversary. Beloved for its exquisite attention to sartorial detail, the brand unveiled the Dualité Crystal Edition Perfume in collaboration with Lalique, an ode to artisanal craftsmanship and the art of olfactory. The glass bottle – of which only 18 are available – stands at nearly 40cm high and features an internal sculpture that was created using the cire-perdue method, the lost-wax technique first used by René Lalique in 1893 and passed down through generations of glassmakers. Inside, the Extrait de Parfum scent was created by master perfumer Michel Almairac over a seven-year-period and features notes of green apple, violet, Ambroxan, and rare iris butter. ‘This collaboration between our maisons became one of shared passion, representing everything we stand for: a dedication to time, the selection of precious raw materials, exquisite artisanry and the difference that human touch makes,’ says Brioni design director, Norbert Stumpfl.

Luca Faloni collaborates with Winetage

Luca Faloni partnered with Winetage, the fellow Italian brand that upcycles wine barrels into original design objects, to create a daybed upholstered in its exquisite brushed linen fabrics. Crafted from wood that still bears the red-wine stains and aromas from years of maturing the best Italian vintages, the daybed is furnished with padded tubes in fruity Bordeaux-red tones. Designed to spotlight the best of Made in Italy, the finished product combines fashion, wine, and design, providing the perfect resting spot to indulge in all three.

Missoni Home opens new Milan store

Missoni Home might be a mainstay in many a Milano dwelling, but it didn’t have its own spot in the city it calls home until this design week. Beside the brand’s Via Solferino showroom, the first dedicated Missoni Home boutique opened this week with its interior decor riffing on several of the brand’s most distinctive signatures, including degradé-painted pillars, zig-zag wallpaper, and its joyful rainbow colour palette, featuring a special curation of its expansive home offering.

Tod’s celebrates Made in Italy craft

As one of Italy’s most recognisable design icons, the Tod’s Gommino driving shoe holds a special place in the Made in Italy playbook. For Salone, the brand released a limited edition of the driving shoe (above) and unveiled a special coffee-table photography tome, ‘Italian Hands; Artisanal Stories From Italy’. A celebration of the processes and products that are exported all over the world, it features prominent Italian tastemakers alongside the artisans with whom they collaborate and promote – including master Murano glassblower Giberto Arrivabene, master of terracotta Rosario Spina, artisan of brass and bronze Ernesto Carati; and pesto connoisseur Christian Belforte. ‘This book is a tribute to those who, every day, with passion and commitment, contribute to keeping a fundamental part of our cultural identity alive,’ says Tod’s group president Diego Della Valle. ‘It is a recognition of those who know how to enhance craftsmanship, making it a symbol of authentic, timeless quality, even for new generations.’

Gucci’s Bamboo Encounters

Few materials are as synonymous with Gucci as bamboo. One of the fashion house’s defining motifs since it was first used on its iconic handbag in 1947, its legacy defines the innovation inherent to the Florentine brand. For Milan Design Week this year, the house invited seven artists to give their take on the material in their own mediums for its installation ‘Gucci Bamboo Encounters’. Curated by 2050+ founder Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli and staged in the cloisters of the Chiostri di San Simpliciano, works ranged from a sculpture by Swedish-Chilean artist Anton Alvarez and a collection of baskets featuring hand-blown glass accents by Palestinian architect, artist, and researcher Dima Srouji, to a jubilant collection of bamboo kites by the Dutch design collective Kite Club. They were joined by artists Nathalie Du Pasquier, Laurids Galleé, and Sisan Lee, each of whom explored the shapeshifting possibilities of this chameleonic material.

READ: Ippolito Pestellini Laparelli on curating Gucci Bamboo Encounters at Fuorisalone: ‘We didn’t want to produce commodities’

‘La Prima Notte Di Quiete’ by Loro Piana and Dimoremilano

Loro Piana may have staged its design week event in the Cortile della Seta courtyard of its Milan headquarters, but there was nothing familiar about this space. Realised in collaboration with design duo Dimorestudio (founded by Britt Moran and Emiliano Salci), the usually light-flooded space had been transformed into a decadent 1970s film set meets affluent Milanese penthouse accessed via a cinema foyer draped in red theatre curtains. Invited through the curtains, visitors were presented with a fully furnished home, featuring furniture designed by Dimorestudio for Loro Piana Interiors alongside exquisite vintage pieces upholstered in Loro Piana’s luxurious home textiles and art from Tornabuoni Art, Cardi Gallery, and Galleria Gracis e Secci Gallery. Immersing visitors in the space for four-minute intervals was a soundtrack curated by music composer and multimedia artist Nicola Guiducci that ranged from excerpted dialogue on a rainy evening to a phone ringing and a piano playing that both heightened the cinematic experience.

Saint Laurent’s homage to Charlotte Perriand

When it comes to the design world, Yves is never far from Saint Laurent. For its design week installation, creative director Anthony Vaccarello looked to one of the design heroes of the French fashion house’s founder, Charlotte Perriand, commissioning four pieces of furniture she conceived between 1943 to 1967 that have only existed as sketches or prototypes until now. Comprising the rosewood and cane sofa designed for the Japanese ambassador’s Paris residence in 1967; the rose and cherrywood Mille-Feuilles table that she made a reduced-scale model of in 1963; the Indochina Guest Armchair she designed for her own home in 1943; and the Rio de Janeiro bookcase she designed in 1962 for her husband Jacques Martin’s apartment, the collection has been produced in full scale for the very first time for Milan Design Week. Standing in homage to the design talents of both Perriand and Saint Laurent, each piece in the collection will be available on an exclusive made-to-order basis following the showcase.

Versace’s celebration of the ‘Art of Living’

The Versace brand may be undergoing creative changes following the announcement last month that Donatella Versace would be stepping down as creative director, but its extravagant proposition for home design remains steadfast at its Milan Design Week presentation, The Versace Art of Living. Described as a ‘universe that brings a fantasy of poise, extravagance and heritage to life’, the star of the show this season was the reinvention of the ‘Harem’ chair, its steel frame made bountiful with the addition of thick padded satin cushions and, of course, a large gold Medusa head, alongside an update the of the 1994 wooden chair the ‘Vanitas’, upholstered in velvet. The house referenced Versace’s last fashion show at the event, stating that, like its ready-to-wear offering, ‘to embody Versace is to embrace a way of living at once proudly historied and decidedly modern, and to live it – to wear it, eat from it, sit on it, sleep in it – with uncompromising intention.’

Dolce & Gabbana’s ode to ‘love and hospitality’

The master of Southern Italian charm, Dolce & Gabbana, brought the verdant coastal landscapes of its founders’ native Sicily to the northern design capital for Salone with Verde Maiolica, a porcelain service in green and white. Celebrating the handmade craftsmanship of the region, its botanical design finds its roots in the Mediterranean shrub, while the collection – comprising tea and coffee sets alongside tableware, flatware and glassware – ‘represents and narrates the tale of love and hospitality’, relayed the brand at its Via Broggi cocktail presentation.

Fendi Casa’s collaboration with Lewis Kemmenoe

Fendi Casa continued its Design Miami collaboration with British designer Lewis Kemmenoe in Milan, seeing him take over the windows of its Via Manzoni flagship with his large-scale abstract panels. Acting as a metaphor for the savoir-faire behind the Rome-based brand’s furniture, they encapsulated the duality of the new interiors collection that is at once sumptuous and minimal. New to its line-up this year was ‘Cover’ sofa, designed to be ‘dressed up or down’ – a sartorial reference to reliable wardrobe staples; the ‘Twist’ chair by Stefano Gallizioli, a wood structure upholstered in leather with armrests resembling the swirls of a ribbon; and the modular ‘Later’ sofa, designed by Ceriani Szostak and inspired by the rationalist architecture of Fendi’s iconic Rome HQ that is famously both imposing and inviting.

Issey Miyake’s ‘Type-XIII Atelier Oï’ lighting

Issey Miyake invited guests to its Milan flagship to unveil ‘Type-XIII Atelier Oï’, the fruits of its collaborative project between the Swiss design studio Atelier Oï and A-POC Able Issey Miyake, which explores the seemingly limitless possibilities of its iconic ‘A Piece of Cloth’ concept. Unveiling lighting prototypes that use one piece of wire and a piece of cloth in several formations, the house presented two distinctive series. The first, the ‘O Series’, draws inspiration from the Japanese art of Ikebana, with five sculptural lights designed to take on the same decorative presence as flower arrangements that can be easily moved around the home with the recycled polyester ‘Steam Stretch’ material used in A-POC Able’s clothes-making process appearing to blossom in spontaneous directions. The second, the ‘A Series’, pays homage to Miyake’s iconic 1997 APOC show that saw a formation of models take to the runway connected by one continuous roll of fabric. Here, a pre-knitted roll stretches out to create a three-shade interconnected light installation that can be cut to size to suit the space it is destined to take pride of place in.

READ: A-POC Able Issey Miyake’s lighting collaboration with Atelier Oï is based on its philosophy of ‘a piece of cloth’

Hermès’ brilliant white box

In a departure from the darkened rooms of recent years, Hermès turned its La Pelota venue into a brilliant-white box. ‘To design an object, to make it, a box is needed,’ visitors were told before stepping into the stark space. Designed by Charlotte Macaux Perelman, architect and artistic director of Hermès collections for the home, the cavernous box-like room presented four polyhedron shapes descending from the ceiling and emitting a fluorescent glow beneath.‘Like a sculptor's marble block, [the box] contains the object, the idea we have of it, and the dream it inspires,’ the house continued. Each of these suspended structures featured this year’s ‘Objects For The Home’, including the ‘Contrepoint Dinner Service’ by Nigel Peake and Pivot D’Hermès side table by Tomás Alonso alongside the ‘Double D’Hermès’ jugs and ‘H Partition’ throws by Studio Hermes. Positioned both inside the cavities and on cutout shelves along their surface, the intersection between an object of function and admiration was brought to the fore.

READ: A bit of all white: Hermès unveils its latest home collections in Milan

Armani Casa’s ‘Oriental Inks’

After two years of delighting Milan Design Week-goers by throwing the doors open to his historic Palazzo Orsini home on Via Borgonuovo, Giorgio Armani opted to redirect attention back to the sprawling Armani Casa flagship on Corso Venezia to mark 25 years of Armani Casa and unveil its new homewares collection, ‘Oriental Inks’. Working in collaboration with De Gournay, iconic items of furniture in the permanent Armani collection were transformed with exquisite silk and beaded embroidery and gold-leaf appliqué depicting bamboo, dragons and jungle landscapes, chosen for being ‘auspicious symbols of strength, flexibility and endurance’ designed to transport their owners – and admirers – elsewhere. The ‘Amedeo’ bed, in particular, took over 200 hours to embroider its monkey-inhabiting canopy scene. ‘The display and the new pieces, authentic examples of the highest level of craftsmanship, are visible through the windows to anyone passing by,’ shared Mr Armani. ‘I quite like the idea of a surprise that captures attention, a suggestion that broadens horizons, now that horizons are often becoming narrower.’

Loewe’s artist-designed teapots

Former Loewe creative director Jonathan Anderson may have left the building, but one of his proudest legacies lives on at design week. Marking its ninth craft exhibition during the city-wide showcase, the brand presented ‘Loewe Teapots’ featuring 25 different interpretations of the ubiquitous vessel by 25 international artists and the last curation from Anderson to be presented by the Spanish house. From the coral-like glaze application of South Korean artist Jane Yang-D'Haene’s pot to the surrealist two faces of Spanish ceramicist Laia Arqueros Claramunt’s design, the collection ranged in depiction from classic ceramic to convention-defying proportions, with each piece representing the intimate ceremony in which a teapot takes the lead.

READ: 25 artists reimagine the teapot at Milan Design Week 2025

Dior expands ‘Ode to Nature’ collection with Sam Baron

Dior Maison worked with French artist Sam Baron to expand its ‘Ode To Nature’ collection with three one-metre-high glass vases that were every bit as intricate as one of the French fashion house’s couture creations. Each depicting its own garden of intertwining branches, petals and foliage, the bodies of the hand-blown and hand-constructed vessels were inspired by the first Miss Dior amphora perfume bottle from 1947. Starting as a ribbed glass tube, each was gently blown and fired over several hours to create the distinctive shape before the exacting process of applying the delicate decorative details could begin. Designed to conjure the bouquets of flowers that founder Dior insisted on having in his salon, each of the three designs is available in a limited edition of eight – Monsieur Christian Dior’s lucky number.

Stay tuned for more of the best fashion moments at Milan Design Week 2025.

Though Prada is, understandably so, mainly known for its clothing since Miuccia Prada took the helm of her family company in 1978, it has always had a robust presence in the cultural sphere. Fondazione Prada, the brand’s art and cultural institution, was founded in 1993 and expanded in 2011 and 2015, with the openings of its Venice and Milan galleries. But more recently, Prada has begun to position itself as a patron of science and the environment, as evidenced by the opening of the Sea Beyond Ocean Literacy Centre in collaboration with UNESCO's Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission UNESCO (UNESCO-IOC), which was unveiled last week on the island of San Servolo in the Venetian lagoon.

Architect Carlo Ratti and creative studio Dotdotdot configure Prada’s new Ocean Literacy Centre

‘The opening of the Sea Beyond Ocean Centre here in San Servolo marks an important milestone in our journey towards restoring our relationship with the ocean,’ says Francesco Santoro, senior programme officer at UNESCO-IOC. ‘This centre is more than just the physical space for hands-on ocean education and awareness-raising activities. It's a symbol of the growing level of recognition of ocean literacy as a discipline and a practice.’

The ground floor space was designed by the architect Carlo Ratti, who is also the curator of the 2025 Venice Architecture Biennale. The building, which looks out over Venice’s placid lagoon waters, incorporates reused timber and circular solutions in the design, including a closed-loop water filtration system to keep consumption to a minimum. Ratti chose a palette of blues throughout the interiors to evoke the feeling of ‘water entering inside,’ he says.

‘You might want to look at the ground in detail,’ he added. ‘Because the ground looks like concrete but is made with shells from the ocean.’

Arranged in an enfilade of rooms, each space is dedicated to the visualisation of different kinds of ocean-related data, conceived by the Milan-based creative studio Dotdotdot. The first two installations, which take the form of interactive maps – one depicting a Spilhaus Projection of global oceans and the other zoomed into the Venetian lagoon – illustrate scientific data via dynamic projections that include the change in water temperature, salinity levels and the flow of currents throughout the year. The final room is dedicated to an interactive game for children and school groups, who will be the centre’s main audience.

Venice as the site of the centre was a natural choice. The city, famously vulnerable to the threats of rising oceans, has long been a site of oceanic research – most notably, the MOSE system, a retractable barrier that shields the fragile city from incoming sea surges and was completed in 2020. It’s also a living laboratory for studying the delicate balance between human settlement and marine ecosystems – a tension that will only intensify in the coming decades.

‘It all started with the idea of having a positive impact on society and giving back to the environment,’ said Lorenzo Bertelli, Prada Group’s head of corporate social responsibility. ‘Which is why starting this journey with [UNESCO-IOC] was a natural choice. We have to speak to and educate future generations – and this is only the beginning of a very long journey.’

The Sea Beyond Ocean Literacy Centre is open to visitors on Tuesday and Friday from 10am to 12pm and from 3pm to 5pm

prada.com

When Formafantasma’s Andrea Trimarchi and Simone Farresin first announced their now-yearly Prada Frames symposium, launched in 2022 during Milan Design Week with the support of the Italian fashion house, it was a welcome antidote to the unforgiving pace and commercial focus of the event. Previous editions have dealt with materials and their relationship to the natural world, the exploitation of forests, and the politics of home. But, for its fourth edition, the pair plan to tackle the connective tissue that unites these issues.

‘We’re looking at infrastructure through the lens of movement,’ says Farresin of the theme, which they have titled ‘In Transit’. More than a dozen academics, designers, artists and thinkers – including MoMA senior curator Paola Antonelli, AI scholar Kate Crawford and poet Tung-Hui Hu – will lead discussions around how AI shapes the environment, the infrastructure of borders, and the intricacies of global trade. The symposium will take place in two locations: the Padiglione Reale, the waiting room once used by the now-deposed Italian royal family at Milano Centrale station, and the Arlecchino (Harlequin) train, designed by Gio Ponti in the 1950s and refurbished by Fondazione FS Italiane in 2020.

Trimarchi and Farresin see the Salone del Mobile as a prescient moment to present this topic, noting that the fair itself is a microcosm of global circulation. ‘There are so many things arriving in the city,’ says Farresin. ‘When we talk about products, it’s impossible not to talk about the distribution process. We felt we had to address how freely these goods travel around the world in comparison to the impositions put on many people.’

The distribution of goods and materials, the pair explain, is something they have been exploring, at least tangentially, in their practice for several years. They point to their 2020 exhibition ‘Cambio’ at London’s Serpentine Gallery, which interrogated governance in the forestry industry, and their ongoing research project, ‘Oltre Terra’, on the global dynamics of wool production. ‘The starting point seems to be the materials,’ says Farresin. ‘But it’s always about the infrastructure of extraction.’

The symposium also gave the pair the opportunity to seek out an icon of Italian design and transportation history. ‘We were always fascinated about the Arlecchino train, but we had never seen it in person,’ says Farresin. ‘So we thought, let’s see if we can use this occasion to also present the train.’

Once a stylish connection between Milan and Rome, the Arlecchino was designed in the 1950s and kept in service until 1992. Ponti’s visual concept for the express train was inspired by the diamond pattern motif worn by the jester-like Harlequin character from the Italian commedia dell’arte tradition. Each of the carriages is rendered in a jewel-toned colour – ruby, emerald, sapphire and gold – with signature wingback seats easily recognisable as Ponti’s style.

‘Instead of having screens and films as a way of communicating knowledge, we can start from the space we are in to establish a conversation on transit and infrastructure,’ says Farresin. ‘A train station is an obvious place to start in terms of location, but it also represents one of the major shifts in infrastructure over the past century, from the physical distribution of goods to the advent of online delivery systems.’

More than just a conference, Trimarchi and Farresin see the format of Prada Frames as a new model for design collaborations. ‘It helped us understand that you can do projects that are not necessarily object-based,’ says Trimarchi. Within a context like Milan Design Week, where brands are often jostling for attention by staging bigger and more elaborate events – namely, temporary installations that will be dismantled and disposed of once the week concludes – hosting a project based solely on discussion is almost radical. ‘It’s the antithesis of anything commercial,’ Farresin says. ‘When we started working on this with Prada, the idea was that there are enough products. Why should we add something more?’

However, they don’t see Prada Frames as an indictment of the Salone del Mobile as a whole. Rather, it’s an opportunity to rethink what design week can be beyond product showcases, while shifting the focus toward critical dialogue and reflection. ‘It’s a way to consider the things that are often overlooked in design,’ continues Farresin. ‘Everything around us is design. At the end of the day, it’s looking at contemporary culture.’

By rooting each edition in research and conversation, Prada Frames pushes the boundaries of what a design event can be. Rather than temporary spectacles that fade once the week ends, it fosters an ongoing dialogue – one that extends beyond Milan and into the wider world. ‘It’s about understanding the world we inhabit,’ says Farresin. ‘That’s what makes it interesting.’  

‘Prada Frames: In Transit’ is on from 6-8 April at the Padiglione Reale and Arlecchino train, Milano Centrale. For more information and to register for complimentary attendance, visit prada.com

Prada has announced the opening of its first standalone restaurant in Asia, a collaboration with acclaimed Hong Kong arthouse director Wong Kar-wai. The dining space will reside in Rong Zhai, a restored 1918 historic mansion and art venue in Shanghai inaugurated by the Prada Group in 2017 as a flexible hub for cultural activities in China.

Mi Shang Prada Rong Zhai, Shanghai

Named Mi Shang – meaning ‘to be obsessed with’ in Chinese – the restaurant will occupy the second floor, offering an all-day café service alongside a fine dining experience. The menu will centre on Italian cuisine infused with Chinese flavours, spanning breakfast, lunch, afternoon tea, dinner, and evening cocktails, fostering a culinary dialogue between the two cultures.

Although yet to be fully unveiled, the design, led by Wong Kar-wai, promises to channel the distinctive aesthetics of his seminal films In the Mood for Love and Happy Together. The space will incorporate mirrors and contrasts to evoke the director’s signature illusory, sensual atmosphere. The concept also draws inspiration from the philatelic concept of tête-bêche – a pair of joined postage stamps where one has been printed upright and the other upside down, whether by design or accident.

‘The idea of reflection, adjacency, and correspondence hints at the intersection of two great cultures, connecting Milan and Shanghai in a visual dialogue that is both sophisticated and unique,’ Prada shares in a statement.

Prada’s engagement with cinema is longstanding, the brand having collaborated with directors Pedro Almodóvar, Danny Boyle, and Ava DuVernay, and also championed film conservation and funding initiatives. The group’s passion for the moving image is also seen in the design of Bar Luce at the Prada Foundation in Milan, conceived by American filmmaker Wes Anderson, as well as its in-house cinema, named after Franco-Swiss director Jean-Luc Godard.

Mi Shang Prada Rong Zhai will be located at No.186, North Shaan Xi Road, Jing’an District, Shanghai, China. It is scheduled to open to the public on 31 March 2025, with bookings taken from 29 March via WeChat mini-program; prada.com

To wear one’s slippers out of the house might once have suggested a descent into madness – or, at least, a bout of extreme forgetfulness. However, a recent resurgence of the slipper on the runway has seen such connotations turned upside down, suggesting that the ultimate luxury is to wear your inside attire outdoors.

As such, the slipper has come to encapsulate a kind of louche, undone elegance: there have been playful riffs on the hotel or spa slipper at Balenciaga and The Row, shaggy, cocooning mules at Rick Owens and Dries Van Noten, while historic Parisian shirtmaker Charvet’s calfskin suede mules – constructed so as not to make a single sound when the wearer walks – have enjoyed had something of a renaissance.

At Prada’s S/S 2025 menswear show, the classic fringed monk strap shoe was mashed up with a razor-thin-soled mule for an unexpected take on the formal slipper, evoking the kind of strange desire that has long been Prada’s modus operandi.

Gently scuffed in appearance as if to suggest wear, co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons said they wanted to create pieces that looked like they ‘have lived a life, that are alive in themselves. We wanted to make this about what you want to wear now.’

A version of this article appears in the April 2025 issue of Wallpaper* , available in print on newsstands from 6 March 2025, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today

As is so often the case, it was fashion soothsayers Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons who seemed to distill the mood of the season with their A/W 2025 collection for Prada, positing a ‘raw glamour’ – a subversive interrogation of the tropes of feminine elegance, from ‘fur’ coats to 1960s-style dresses, which Mrs Prada said chimed with a growing unease about the state of the world. ‘It is not my job to be political but when you open a newspaper – oh my God!’ Mrs Prada said after the show. ‘Our job is to think about what clothes a woman can wear, about what kind of femininity makes sense in this moment.’

Nostalgic glamour – largely twisted or disrupted – ran throughout the season in evocations of ’fur’ (almost exclusively faux, or cleverly manipulated shearling), bra tops and pussybow blouses, celebrating an unconventional, dishevelled beauty. The carved or sculpted waistline also emerged as a trend throughout the month – though in the hands of designers like Sarah Burton, who made her debut at Givenchy, the silhouette was stripped of connotations of confinement. ‘[It’s about] strength, vulnerability, emotional intelligence, feeling powerful or very sexy,’ she said. Elsewhere, cocooning and concealing silhouettes protected against the elements – whether real or existential – while upside-down and back-to-front silhouettes reflected our topsy-turvy moment.

Here, Wallpaper* fashion features editor Jack Moss selects the trends and takeaways from the A/W 2025 womenswear shows, which concluded earlier this week in Paris.

Designers explored a ‘raw glamour’

‘Raw glamour’ was the term coined by Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons to describe their A/W 2025 womenswear collection for Prada. ‘Glamour was something we were attracted to, instinctively, and its connection to femininity,’ said Mrs Prada on a show which interrogated notions of conventional beauty – all the way down to the dishevelled bed head hair by Guido Palau. Typically feminine silhouettes – like 1960s-style dresses – were blown up in size as if sizes too big, or came creased and sliced-away raw at the hem. Meanwhile tropes of feminine elegance – like fur coats or ladylike handbags – were subverted in provocative style, the former into strange forms with protusions around the neck or trapped under plastic (‘fur’ was actually shearling – more on that later). ‘It is not my job to be political but when you open a newspaper – oh my God!’ Mrs Prada said after the show. ‘Our job is to think about what clothes a woman can wear, about what kind of femininity makes sense in this moment.’

A similar mood was struck at Miu Miu – where Mrs Prada works solo – seeing the designer propose a wardrobe of undone Milanese glamour, where similar hallmarks of femininity, from the 1950s-pointed bra to ‘fur’ stoles and brooches, were warped and disrupted. ‘These accessories of femininity – bras, furs, brooches – they are things we have had forever. Are they relevant today? Do they lift us up?’ she said of the collection, which played out amid a set entirely covered in girlish yellow moiré. A similar mood ran throughout the season: at Valentino, Alessandro Michele’s louche, eclectic vision of glamour – sheer lace bodies, satin bra tops and bows, more ‘furs’ and feathers – played out amid a surreal ‘public bathroom’ (models tottered around the space, gussying themselves up in the toilet mirrors as if in a nightclub restroom), while Francesco Risso’s Marni playfully riffed on the salon show with high-colour faux furs, patchworked dresses and 3D flower adornment. At Acne Studios, pussybow bodysuits and slashed scarf dresses – straight out of a Helmut Newton photograph – were worn with fuzzy ‘fur’ coats, their construction inspired by that of teddy-bear limbs.

Textures and prints got animalistic

The proliferation of ‘fur’ this season was unavoidable, appearing in various iterations, from candy-striped at Gucci, two-toned at Marni, to mink-grey at Giorgio Armani. Almost exclusively faux or crafted from cleverly manipulated shearling, the by-product of meat and dairy farming (an exception was Gabriela Hearst, where the sustainably conscious designer had crafted a coat from second-hand mink to prevent waste), its use suggested both Prada’s ‘instinctual attraction to glamour’ and a desire for protection (indeed, some uses of the material were almost primitive in their cut). Highlights included a series of incredible ‘fur’ coats and stoles at Fendi’s 100th anniversary show which had the illusion of fox, mink or sable but were actually shearling – a paean to the house’s brand of Roman elegance – while at Rabanne, tassel-like ‘tails’ hung from coats and dresses. The animalistic mood extended into print, both Dolce & Gabbana and Saint Laurent featured leopard spots – the latter under a slick of transparent resin – while at Duran Lantink, zebra, cow, python and leopard prints met in an unconventional mélange (in a playful flourish, the model Leon Dame was entirely body-painted in black and white zebra stripes).

The waist was accentuated

‘McQueen is about a waist,’ said the Irish designer Séan McGirr at his A/W 2025 show for the British house, after a trip into the archive had drawn him towards Lee McQueen’s amped-up ‘hourglass’ silhouette – accentuated shoulder, narrow-waist – which captures the clash of power and eroticism which ran through his collections. McGirr’s riff was lithe and elongated, with extra-long sleeves, a corseted waistline and rounded, armour-like shoulders. ‘I took a lot of pieces from the archive, especially tailoring, and reworked them in a way that made sense for today.’

Meanwhile former McQueen designer Sarah Burton’s acclaimed debut at Givenchy – which also began with a return to the archive, inspired by a lost trove of Hubert de Givenchy’s 1952 sketches – saw her meticulous eye for tailoring create carved-waist blazers and overcoats with a wide, amplified shoulder line that was without constriction. ‘I want to address everything about modern women,’ she said. ‘[It’s about] strength, vulnerability, emotional intelligence, feeling powerful or very sexy. All of it.’ At Miu Miu, wool tailoring was cleverly constructed with a fold under the chest – the result was a narrowed, though not restrictive, waistline – while at Balenciaga, meticulous pattern-cutting saw ‘fur’-hooded nylon parkas whereby the quilted exterior had been reworked to recall a corset or bodice.

Things got turned back to front, or upside down

When Celine Dion wore a white John Galliano tuxedo to the Academy Awards in 1999, she landed on numerous worst dressed lists. Turns out the Canadian chanteuse was simply ahead of her time: this season, several designers turned garments back to front – a fitting uniform for our topsy-turvy times. Most committed were Paris-based duo Danial Aitouganov and Imruh Asha, whose A/W 2025 collection for fledgling brand Zomer saw almost every look turned upside-down or back-to-front resulting in a kind of opposites day in clothing form (even the run of the show went backwards, starting with the finale). At Givenchy, Burton presented a more refined take with a sculptural tailored jacket which fastened along its back, while at Hodakova – the buzzy LVMH Prize-winning label run by Ellen Hodakova Larsson – trousers were turned upside down and recut into dresses (belts still ran around the waistline, which was now the hem). Meanwhile at Issey Miyake, performers contorted themselves into surreal forms as part of a collaboration with Erwin Wurm and his ‘One Minute Sculptures’ – a reflection of the playfully surreal collection, in which shopping bags became tops and trompe l’oeil prints saw dresses printed on dresses.

Looks were cocooning, wrapped or concealing

The want for protection, to be covered up, wrapped and cocooned is nothing new for the winter season, though for A/W 2025 the current state of unease – referenced by numerous designers this season, from Miuccia Prada to Rei Kawakubo – no doubt contributed to a renewed desire to be protected against the elements (whether the everyday or the existential). Most strikingly, this came in the idea of concealment: several designers created silhouettes this season which obscured the hands, whether the jaunty kangaroo pockets on dresses at Issey Miyake – it made the models appear to be clutching their hands to their chests – or Rokh’s long, cape-like silhouettes which entirely enveloped the hands of the wearer.

At Hermès, Nadège Vanhée presented a collection which moved between a determined sensuality – she also carved the waist in sinuous leather dresses – and something softer and enveloping, figured in coats with enormous collars, or leather jackets with soft double-faced cashmere linings. A similar tenderness was struck at Sacai, whereby Chitose Abe said she was thinking about the act of wrapping: as such, the silk foulard became a motif, inspiring the cut or dresses or inset into a blazer. Meanwhile at Comme des Garçons, a liberated A/W 2025 collection – which Kawakubo said was a celebration of the ‘small but mighty’ – saw enormous sculptural ‘gloves’ wrapped around the hand like a boxer’s gloves or lobster claw. It spoke to the idea that concealment could be as much about armour as comfort – a mood reflected at Junya Watanabe, where leather jackets were cut with giant spikes or had a plate-like construction, like a beetle’s shell.

As seen in the March Style Issue of Wallpaper*, photographer Luca Strano and stylist Nicola Neri capture the mood of undone elegance that ran through the S/S 2025 menswear collections with a series of collaged and layered-up looks – a proposition for translating the runway into the everyday.

Titled ‘Cut and Paste’, the photo series offers lessons in embracing fashion’s new mood of eclecticism – a throughline of the S/S 2025 season – whether doubling up on jersey vests or shirts for a subversive twist on basics, leaving buttons undone to expose slices of skin, or tying-up the arms of a sweater for playful new proportions.

Cut and paste: how to wear the S/S 2025 menswear collections

Other garments come with layering built in, whether the trim of lace that emerges from beneath an otherwise quotidien grey sweater from JW Anderson, or a trompe l’oeil belt on a pair of Prada trousers (co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons describe their S/S 2025 collection as one where nothing is quite what it seems).

Elsewhere, a diaphonous sheer top by Dries Van Noten is worn over an Hermès blazer – a satisfyingly strange take on eveningwear – while T-shirts and jackets hang from the waistband of trousers to surreal effect. Meanwhile accessories – from colourful lace masks to colourful nylon sneakers and metal brooches – contribute to the season’s uninhibited mood.

Explore the looks below.

Model: Owen Ruppersburg at Milk Management. Casting: Svea Casting. Set design: Harry Stayt. Grooming: Lachlan Mackie. Photography assistants: Elliott Gunn, Luca Viopelle. Fashion assistant: Sophie Bell. Set design assistant: Marko Ilic. Production assistant: Archie Thomson.

A version of this article appears in the March 2025 issue of Wallpaper*, available in print on international newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.