Milan Fashion Week Men’s S/S 2025: Fendi to Dolce & Gabbana

A new injection of energy comes to Milan Fashion Week Men’s this season thanks to something of a British invasion: Martine Rose, who is largely inspired by underground subcultures in her idiosyncratic menswear collections, will debut at the week, while heritage house Dunhill will also join the Milan schedule. Elsewhere London-based label JW Anderson continues to show its menswear collections in the city. 

Other talking points of the weekend will include Sabato De Sarno’s sophomore menswear collection for Gucci, this season shifting to Monday morning (17 June 2024) and taking place at Triennale di Milano, the art and design gallery first constructed in the 1930s (it will continue De Sarno’s desire to foster a link with the arts, having shown his Cruise 2025 collection at London’s Tate Modern last month). Prada, meanwhile, will no doubt take over the timeline with a typically transporting set created alongside OMA/AMO, backdropping what will be one of the season’s defining collections. 

The schedule is rounded out by the titans of Milanese style: among them Dolce & Gabbana, Zegna, Fendi and Armani, while Massimo Giorgetti will celebrate 15 years of his Milan-based label MSGM.

The best of Milan Fashion Week Men’s S/S 2025

Emporio Armani

Unbridled horses frolicking in the surf, purple fields of lavender: the projections on the wall of the Teatro Armani showspace set the scene for an Emporio collection titled ‘Freedom in Nature’ which saw Mr Armani supplant his man for the season from his usual urban sprawl and into the wilds. The mood was one of adventure and abandon: shirting was plunging and worn with voluminous pants and heavy boots – the latter a nod to equestrianism – while superfine tailoring recalled safari jackets and kimonos. A focus on the waist ran throughout, whether in the belted utility jackets or the loops of leather which narrowed the waist of the designer’s louche, lightweight tailored blazers. It ended with the scent of lavender as a stream of lederhosen-clad men promenaded the space with baskets full of the springtime-blooming flower. Here, nature might have been somewhat tamed, but it nonetheless made from a transporting closing milieu, with the models surrounding Mr Armani – this season joined by Leo Dell’Orco and Silvana Armani, who look after the house’s men’s and womenswear collections – for his usual ovation, this year all-the-more celebratory in anticipation of his 90th birthday next month. 

Fendi

Fendi left behind its usual showspace in the house’s Via Solari HQ (renovations and an expansion are currently underway), transporting guests to a studio lot-like showspace on Milan’s outskirts. It lent the presentation a grander scale, a feeling mimicked by the enormous mirrored blocks which danced around the runway as if operated by remote control, reflecting both audience and models across their spinning surfaces. Silvia Venturini Fendi, who heads up the house’s menswear and accessories collections, said that this season she was inspired by a deep dive into the Fendi archive. The Roman house will turn 100 this year, and the designer created a celebratory crest comprising four of the house’s motifs, including the famed double-F emblem, which here adorned sweaters and shirts. It lent the collection a varsity feel – Venturini Fendi talked before the show about wanting Fendi to feel like a team, or club – where striped knit rugby sweaters and ties met plaid jackets, school blazers and a playful riff on the football shirt. This was a uniform for the Fendi clan – and its wide-reaching international fanbase – to sport with pride in its centenary year.

Dolce & Gabbana

‘Italian Beauty’ was the title of Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana’s latest menswear collection, which saw the duo make a subtle gear-shift from the sharp, reduced line of recent seasons towards something softer, inspired by effortless Italian summers and actors like the louche Marcello Mastroianni. Raffia, a distinct hallmark of Italian furnishings, was one such motif, used here to create airy summer jackets and oversized polo shirts, while ever-astute tailoring – here largely double-breasted and worn with pleated trousers which narrowed towards the hem – harked back to the 1950s. Elsewhere, the collection was enlivened with flourishes of embroidery and embellishment, like the sprays of delicate red flowers which aodrned crisp white trousers and jackets.

MSGM

It was 15 years ago that Italian designer Massimo Giorgetti founded MSGM, a landmark celebrated with his latest menswear show held in a former industrial garage on Milan’s outskirts on Saturday morning. The crisp, optical collection, which looked towards the sea for inspiration, was backdropped by explosions of primary-colour paint against a series of Perspex boxes which lined the runway. They were an ode, Giorgetti elaborated, to an early collection he drafted an artist to daub with paint after fearing it was too safe. It also referenced the broad strokes of colour and graphic motifs the designer has evoked over the last decade and a half, here conjured in a vivid array of pattern, from riffs on nautical stripes and colourful daisies to painterly prints of seaside scenes. Indeed, Giorgetti said it is in his cliffside home in Liguria, close to Portofino, where the ideas for the collection percolated. As for the mood, this was a Mediterranean summer at its most evocative: ‘the rocks, Mediterranean pines, agaves, the scent of salt and resin,’ he listed, transporting guests – in Giorgetti’s typically uplifting fashion – from a cloudy Milan to the Italian riviera. 

Stay tuned for more from Milan Fashion Week Men’s S/S 2025.