Here, compiled for easy reference, are our reviews of the Spring Summer 2025 Men’s shows from Milan Fashion Week.
Dolce & Gabbana
Italian style hasn’t expired yet, according to Dolce&Gabbana. For Spring Summer 2025, the house insists we shouldn’t be overwhelmed by modernity and, instead, look for answers in the beauty of its history.
Read the full review here.
Fendi
When you’re a hundred years into your empire, most creative directors would swerve toward the avant-garde or the bold. Statement-making fashion has been a persisting formula, especially for heritage houses, but for Silvia Venturini Fendi — a cultural change-maker in her own right — it is a formula that just won’t do for the Fendi empire.
As the first collection of the Roman maison’s centenary, the house establishes the SS25 collection as one as reverential to the Fendi legacy, as it is to the Fendi future. Robotic chrome-coated pillars reflected and rotated as the latest season was waltzed across the room, refracting to represent the now. Crossroads or not, it was Venturini Fendi’s way of sticking to her guns, and dealing in quieter doses of change.
Mildly, classic uniform tropes are subverted by the head matriarch. See jerseys emblazoned with the Fendi script, Selleria-stitched denim, and asymmetrically collared oxford shirts all echo this. But still present is a quality of vitality into the collection, as if to remind that the brand is alive, and kicking — lest we forget the kind of cultural hold Venturini Fendi had over the 90s. Verve kicks in with pastel-forward checks, a double Baguette (because the only way forward is with with multiplicity) and plays on the new insignia, which incorporated a squirrelly nod to Venturini Fendi’s own matriarch, its signatures of Pequin stripes and the FF logo, and Janus, the Roman god of beginnings and endings. But as far as we can see, there are no endings in sight. Merely, new opportunities are rife for the house’s hundredth year of existence, opportunities that Venturini Fendi has shown that she understands how to seize.
Prada
What’s an obstacle if it’s only ever just an illusion? At Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons’ 8th co-directed men’s show, Prada finally receives a taste of the rave. Not just any part of the escapist subject so intertwined with Simons but rather the moments of a high that blurs the lines between reality and deception. It’s about a night out at a house party and you start entering that stage when you’ve had too much to drink. Your head spins, you can’t tell your friends apart from strangers, and everything begins to feel weird. You get the point: it’s a reverence for youth. This time, however, we’re taken into the POV of its intoxicated guest.
But how do you express such self-referential chaos through clothes? You make use of trompe-l’œil. What seemed like layered cardigans over sweaters were optical tricks done so by colour blocks. Then came the belts sewn directly on pants but don’t function as belts, below the waistband to create that sense of unease. Tailored jackets come pre-crumpled, as though encasing its wear forever. And sleeves come intentionally cropped, shrunken from their original shape. It’s easy to imagine them as wrecked versions of the clothes cool kids wear within the rave continuum. You can almost feel how much better the clothes would look with hard liquor spilt on them. Put on an over-played techno song and you will get it; that’s as Prada as it gets.
Gucci
There’s a sense of self in the new Gucci, and Spring Summer 2025 is a journey to find freedom.
Read the full review here.
ZEGNA
Confidence has settled at ZEGNA. Once beholden to the sartorial, its Spring Summer 2025 showing shows an ascension not only in craft but reverence.
Read the full review here.
Once you are done with this story, click here to catch up with our June/July 2024 issue, starring Jeff Satur on the cover.
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