Ultimately, it can be misleading — or at a bare minimum, wilfully oversimplifying — to try and shoehorn a discussion around trends into Fashion Week.
But as the Paris menswear shows continue apace (we will be updating this article with coverage of those after the weekend), it’s hard to deny the emergence of certain broad brushstroke themes that journalists and buyers have gleaned so far: in Milan and at Pitti Uomo.
As ever, BH‘s number one priority is to sieve, from fashion’s abstract runways, a few tangible and practical insights: the kind you can apply to your very own wardrobe at home, no matter whether you’re a fashion newbie or the sort of weapons-grade obsessive who has an annual BoF subscription.
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Game Of Tones
Somewhat accidentally in keeping with 2025’s ‘mocha mousse’ theme (declared by Pantone to be the “colour of the year”), a good number of the capital-F brands staging shows in Milan this Fall opted for shades of grey, rust, taupe, burgundy, and various seasonal tonalities in between.
Still, it wouldn’t be quite right to suggest that the use of colour at Fashion Week was “subdued”, particularly as various designers have sought to enhance the effect of matte/neutral shades by way of clever contextual means.
At Ermenegildo Zegna, Artistic Director Alessandro Sartori dropped 61 looks into a verdant hillside landscape meant to “evoke the lush landscapes of Australia”: a critical region for the brand, and source of its vellus aureum (‘golden fleece’) fabric for which the show was named.
Sartori conceived of the fleecy Merino textile in generous, sartorial cuts — think cacciatore suits in a matching, dusty pink plaid. Similarly at Giorgio Armani’s Fall 2025 runway (that foundational pillar of the MFW schedule), the nonagenarian designer proved once again why he is the King of Milano: pulling out a rogue’s gallery of grey herringbones, houndstooths, and corduroys.
Many even wink to his singular collections of the 1980s — a welcome gesture for those with deep pockets, keen to embrace vintage Armani’s current populist boom.
Such traditional volumes give an otherwise rustic palette a gloss of lavish energy: an effect that those playing from home can approximate, by layering multiple pieces in the same ballpark of the colour spectrum.
Statement Outerwear Is Here To…Stay
Blame it on espionage-glorifying TV series like The Day Of The Jackal, or a more fiscally conservative mood in luxury. Whatever the case: a majority of the Italian fashion houses this season have been effusive in their endorsement of big, heavy investment-grade outerwear.
At its presentation in the grandiose rooms of Milan’s Villa Necchi, Tod’s lent the leather it so famously uses in its driving shoes and bags to the new purpose of outerwear — worn, in the mode of the new Silicon Valley aristocracy, with quarter-zips and sneakers, bucket hats and knit t-shirts.
Matteo Tamburini, who was appointed to the position of Tod’s Creative Director in late 2023, was inspired by the “delicacy and refinement of pashmina” to imagine leather as something light and remarkably versatile.
Those ideas are repeated at certain key moments throughout the collection: in leather as a functional element, leather as decoration (e.g. on pockets and seams) and, of course, as its own ultimate indulgence.
Comfort’s Still Key, But So Is Dressing Up
As our world embraces an increasingly fractious economic and political order, consumers of fashion have sought comfort in the conventional. This isn’t a new development by any means, but for Fall/Winter 2025, designers are championing the familiar in a prolific way.
For Dunhill’s Fall presentation in Milan — in the gilded halls of the Circolo del Giardino — designer Simon Holloway stayed the course he has charted since his arrival at the British leather goods house two seasons ago.
The theme: taking the English drape cut (synonymous with brands established in Alfred Dunhill’s lifetime) into a subtly innovative realm of “casual elegance”.
As ever, the Dunhill look is by and large a dressed-up affair: filled with three-piece tailoring, Donegal tweeds, corduroy the colour of forest floors, and a frankly gargantuan quantity of formalwear.
The innovative aspect, which Holloway appears to have horse-whispered into his Fall collection, is technical. Familiar combinations, of sport coats and heavy cotton trousers, are rendered with a joy that is contagious: in dusty pinks, banana-greens and historic shades of khaki.
For a more explicit study of the duality between comfort and elegance, we turn to Paris — where the Fall/Winter schedule is very much still underway.
Embracing the momentum that comes with showing early on in the calendar, cult Japanese label Auralee has already been much acclaimed this season for proposing garments that feel personable, versatile, and anchored in the realm of everyday living.
Founder Ryota Iwai explains that he based his Fall 2025 looks around the personal wardrobe of a “slightly older friend”; and that organising principle can be keenly felt in the visual cohesion and worn-in feel you get looking at his clothes.
That is particularly true of the menswear: if Auralee’s latest show (and indeed, Dunhill’s for that matter) is a useful barometer, then it would appear the once-maligned necktie is finding fresh relevance — its corporate overtone offset by baggy suiting or squishy layering beneath leather and hoodies.
Once again, the key to nailing the sorts of contradiction that Iwai so enthusiastically proposes is to work with a sufficiently large proportion: men tend to be more comfortable taking risks when they are literally comfortable. And what’s a teeny tiny cardigan, worn over pinstripes and army sneakers, if not a risk?
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