A new edition of Milan Fashion Week has recently taken place, as many Italian designers and brands showcased their menswear collections for the 2020 event.
Given the recent outings in the runway landscape, we were quite reluctant and, at the same time excited to see what would come out of Milan this January. Runway shows have generally been quite hard to digest recently – with plenty of exceptions of course – but the men’s fashion scene seems to be more interested in convincing people of things rather than creating clothes that will have a strong social and artistic impact, as we’ve seen with the recent London Fashion Week.
However, Milan is a town for men’s men, so we had some high expectations from MFW. And, while the Fashion Week was not as colorful and dandy as a Pitti Uomo event, it did rise up to the occasion.
Of course, there were still the usual suspects present: oversized clothes, dystopian shapes, boring colors and the rest, but there were also some interesting styles, details and exciting clothes. And that’s very reinvigorating. We could also see that many brands rehashed old collections they made or took inspiration from what others did a few seasons ago (it seems that Dior from a few years ago was a big source of inspiration), but overall, the collections were a lot better than what we saw in the London collections.
Many of the presented clothes were in one way or another based on asymmetry. Some also featured bands that visually appeared to hold together the entire outfit. These were interesting details not just because they were quite unique, but also because they were a reflection of our time: we live in a misbalanced world and groups are for the moment still being held together by a thread. We could see these themes processed for example in the Emporio Armani and No. 21 collections.
We could also see a bunch of capes and cape-like items, which are a nice response to the head-to-toe covering we saw during the last seasons.
Many brands looked, as said before, to the past for inspiration. This time around, it wasn’t as much a look at the social and aesthetic past of culture, but at fashion’s own past creations.
For a while now, we’ve been discussing how the tide is turning in the menswear world and how it is likely that in the future many brands will return to what they did at their peak. We could also see many collections being addressed to younger audiences, such as the Ermenegildo Zegna collection, which indicates that fashion is also expanding.
Some of our highlights were the Emporio and Giorgio Armani collections, the Fendi collection and the shows from Prada and Alexander McQueen.
The autumn-winter 2020 collections that were presented during the January 2020 installment of Milan Fashion Week did give us hope that we may see some cool Pitti-style outfits on the main runways of the world. And that’s a cool thought.
Fraquoh and Franchomme
Further reading:
What’s Happening at London Fashion Week (Autumn-Winter 2020)?
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