Things are not what they seem at Milan Fashion Week Men’s

The real and the fake seemed to preoccupy Milan this spring/summer 2025 menswear season — and, for once, it wasn’t about fur. Rather, it’s a wider sweep, nodding to the “dupe culture” of counterfeiting, AI and “deep fakes”, artificially plumped faces and the flatness of two-dimensional imagery.

Sounds like a weird bunch of references, but not as weird as some of the fashion visions we saw: Martine Rose attached patently prosthetic noses to the models wearing bootleg football kits in her debut Milan show; Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons created trompe l’œil-fused garments, including 3D printed “belts” slung low around the crotch of their trousers; and even the sober and sophisticated Zegna sent models out holding a bag in each hand in a (real) field of (fake) linen flax.

Maybe what all that trickery was actually about was authenticity, about engaging with your audience in a true and meaningful way, and therefore convincing them to buy pieces? Prada’s fakery, for one, was utterly convincing. From afar, the clothes looked normal — until they came closer and you realised a striped T-shirt and foulard was actually an all-in-one print, or that a cardigan over a shirt actually comprised a single snugly-knitted sweater pricked with decorative buttons.

Instead of emblems and slogans, Prada carved triangles out of the nape of the neck on shirts, sweaters and coats, like an anti-logo, sometimes exposing under-layers, sometimes skin. This was a fantastic example of a fashion show as a vehicle for conveying ideas; the clothes literally transformed before our eyes as details swam into focus.

All those printed belts, inlaid into the hip of trousers, also looked great — an arresting detail that, oddly, could easily transfer to the wardrobe of a man who wants to grab attention and focus eyes on his groin. Elsewhere there were subtler touches, like wire twisting collars and cuffs of Oxford shirts or cotton jackets in poster-paint bright colours, as if clothes were manipulated by an unfelt wind, and flat wool trousers printed to resemble heavy tweeds. The bags were sturdy, hardy and sellable.

Bags were also a focus at Fendi, where the brand is about to slide into its 100th year of business under a new CEO, Pierre-Emmanuel Angeloglou. Silvia Venturini Fendi seemed to be asking questions about what constitutes real luxury, looking back on a century of craft and translating it into her new pieces. She alighted on the house’s thick Selleria stitching, based on saddlery, using it to edge outerwear and the omnipresent leather goods.

Oddly, like Martine Rose, she also took inspiration from football — an Italian national obsession to rival fashion — and created her own ersatz crest to decorate her clothes, marked with Fendi emblems pulled from the archive, where she has been spending plenty of time recently. It’s an approach many brands are taking, given that history is one thing that can’t be faked.

Dolce & Gabbana’s reality was rather more straightforward: no intellectual consideration of the simulacra that populate modern society, no archeological digging into archives in search of lost time. The collection was a homage to Italy (their usual inspirational stomping-ground), via Neapolitan tailoring and a detour through Marcello Mastroianni’s mid-century back-catalogue. What it added up to was a slick, summery collection of tailored short-shorts and roomy “amphora” trousers pegged at the hem, wide-cut shirts and thick stripes like the Pali da Casada that pierce Venetian docks.

There were also hand-woven raffia looks, nodding to Italian artisan traditions but with a lightness of touch. Indeed, after a few collections that have felt slightly heavy handed, this was Dolce & Gabbana easing up, freshening up and indeed shaping up. It was an easy show to watch and enjoy; these are easy clothes to wear and enjoy.

So too were the wares at Gucci. The label’s still new-ish designer Sabato De Sarno has rooted his clothes in a sharp cleanliness of line, an aesthetic jolt to reignite interest in the brand, but is now working at compressing intense craft into those simple silhouettes.

He also has an excellent eye for colour: his signature ancora red, the luscious colour of beef carpaccio, was joined this time by a brittle icy lavender, a blushed pink and an acidic green. Those colours could be bold choices for a man, as could shirts bristling with thousands of sequins or beads above barely thigh-crazing short-shorts (yes, a trend is born), but De Sarno made them feel eminently real. So too did the all-important accessories, on which Gucci’s business hinges. They were small, shiny grab-bags in gloss leather embossed with the brand logo that had the moreish appeal of boiled sweets.

So that was the easy and the real — how about something a bit trickier, and more surreal? JW Anderson served up a great show of gargantuan knits, looped satin neckties, strange shredded car wash skirts and desirable leather or nylon bomber jackets with a strange upward kick to their hems. It was inspired, he said, by the idea of being “spaced out”.

The clothes themselves were trippy, with outlandish proportions, padded satin coats or leather tunics enveloping the body, leaving the models’ skinny legs dangling out gawkishly. Everyday, they were not. But Anderson’s price-points are accessible, and his audience skews young and experimental. In part, the extreme dress he’s seen young people wearing served as the gist for this collection, which was one of his finest outings. A series of knitted separates styled like Georgian town houses may well be as close to property ownership as many Gen Z get.

London-based designer Martine Rose, who I’ve mentioned a few times already, presented a screwball, oddball show of models careening around a darkened warehouse in ratty knee-length wigs with obviously fake stuck-on noses. The clothes were strange too, but in their explorations of kinkiness — leather zip-through crotches on trousers, prominent breast-cups on womenswear and the word “Eros” printed across garments — they had a link to the hyper-sexualisation of pop culture right now.

Rose is an influential figure: her skew-whiff proportions and purposefully ugly accessories have had a wide impact on menswear over the past decade, amplified at one point by a consultancy at Balenciaga. This was her first show in Milan, and although she was dwarfed by the business acumen and publicity power of Italian behemoth brands, Rose’s work still resonated loudly, because it is 100 per cent authentic.