MEN, OR PERHAPS... Parisian and Milanese Notes, June 2026
The top menswear trends from Milan and Paris Fashion Weeks 2027
Let's begin with a shoe. After all, every story must start somewhere, and lately shoes seem to say more about contemporary masculinity than anyone who's written an essay on the subject. Anthony Vaccarello's transparent PVC derby, worn barefoot with socks seemingly outlawed—whether by decree or clever marketing in an era when everyone appears to be selling feet on OnlyFans—set the tone immediately. For Saint Laurent, Vaccarello transformed the Bourse de Commerce with Cloud #07156, Fujiko Nakaya's ethereal fog installation, which continuously released water vapour from the floor of the rotunda. Models emerged from the mist only to disappear again, dissolving into the haze before reappearing moments later. The references were explicit: Marguerite Duras, Tina Chow, and Patricia Highsmith's Tom Ripley.
Ten years into his tenure, Vaccarello has now occupied the role longer than any creative director since Yves Saint Laurent himself, and it shows—in the best possible way. His work has acquired the effortless certainty that only comes with time. The labor behind it disappears, leaving only the clarity of the result. The final trio of gold looks, a deliberate nod to Hedi Slimane's Fall Winter 2000 collection during his first chapter at Saint Laurent, closed the show like a flame that had burned low throughout before suddenly flaring up on the final note.
Jonathan Anderson chose a very different setting: the Musée Nissim de Camondo, arguably one of Paris's most beautiful yet undeservedly overlooked museums. Overlooking Parc Monceau, the early twentieth-century mansion was built by Moïse de Camondo as a reinterpretation of the Petit Trianon and houses one of France's most remarkable collections of eighteenth-century decorative arts. It has remained untouched since the Camondo family was deported and murdered at Auschwitz. To inhabit this space, Anderson commissioned Italian painter Giangiacomo Rossetti to create portraits of his models, hanging them on the walls as though they had belonged there for centuries. His protagonist is an aristocratic yet effortlessly relaxed man—somewhere between Barry Lyndon and Mr Darcy after a Californian shipwreck. The image succeeds because it bridges two centuries without visible seams, avoiding the self-conscious historicism that so often weighs fashion when it turns to the past. Fred Again's soundtrack worked according to the very same principle. Just as the musician builds tracks from fragments and samples, Anderson constructs garments from archival references. A dinner jacket, an equestrian coat, an eighteenth-century embroidery: disparate pieces collide until they form an entirely new visual language. This Dior is still finding its voice, certainly, but it is doing so in full view, with a visual intelligence and freedom rarely granted to a house of such historic significance.
Rick Owens took over the Palais de Tokyo with a collection titled Stone, drawing inspiration from Buckminster Fuller and the concept of tensegrity—structures held together not by direct contact, but by networks of invisible tension, where balance depends entirely on forces that cannot be seen. The idea became tangible as a monumental fountain sent sweeping arcs of water over the audience while, just beyond the museum walls, Paris was enduring a record-breaking 44.3°C heatwave. The black umbrellas handed out at the entrance felt almost ceremonial. They would have suited Owens' gothic sensibility regardless of the weather, because for him gothic is less an aesthetic than a permanent state of mind. The collection balanced crisp poplin jackets fitted with detachable leather shoulder pieces, latex capes and sheer tanks that hovered on the edge of lingerie. Then came the collaboration with adidas—his first since 2017—including an inflatable performance suit equipped with an integrated cooling system. It was perhaps the only moment during the entire week when the climate crisis entered fashion, not as a metaphor but as an engineering challenge. If fashion is to confront environmental collapse honestly, perhaps this is the only meaningful way to do it: not by commenting on it, but by designing it.
The final day belonged to Celine. Inside a tennis club in Paris's 16th arrondissement, where fans greeted guests before they even reached their seats, Michael Rider presented his first menswear collection since taking the creative helm in 2024. That fact alone said something about his approach. Rider is a designer who builds quietly, without grand declarations or the urge to plant conceptual flags in unexplored territory. Wide-legged trousers in turquoise and coral, soft gabardine overcoats and silhouettes that refused to define themselves as either masculine or feminine suggested that the distinction itself had become irrelevant. That is perhaps Rider's central idea—or rather, his refusal to insist on one. There was no manifesto, no carefully articulated thesis, only the quietly radical notion. First championed by Yves Saint Laurent in the 1970s, that luxury should be measured by how often a garment is worn and by the memories it accumulates over time. In a season where so many collections resembled doctoral dissertations, that almost felt like an act of heresy.
Then the journey rebounded to Milan. For Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons, the destination was what they called Clarity—a process of distilling menswear down to its essentials. In practice, that meant jeans, T-shirts and blazers: perhaps the most ordinary wardrobe imaginable, reworked through cropped slim trousers, cream denim, flashes of acid green and radioactive yellow, and hiking-inspired accessories transformed into objects of urban sophistication. Climbing bags became belt bags; monk-strap shoes acquired multiple fastening straps. The result suggested a man caught somewhere between an Alpine mountain hut and an elegant bourgeois living room, unwilling to choose between the two. That hesitation, paradoxically, made him the most convincing character of the week. He had no need to explain himself.
But what remains, in the end, of all this accumulation of runways, artificial fogs, fountains, oil portraits and climbing harnesses? Perhaps nothing that can be systematized—and that may be precisely the point. There is Vaccarello’s ghost-man, appearing and disappearing inside the mist; Anderson’s cultured collage-man, assembled from fragments of centuries; Rider’s man without adjectives; Owens’ inflated, hyper-constructed man; and Prada’s man reduced, quite literally, to essentials. Between them, outside the converted museums and climate-controlled catwalks, there is the reality of 44-degree heat that, inside, seemed to belong to no one in particular. If there is a conclusion, it is that menswear no longer tries to define masculinity so much as to dissolve it into atmospheres, systems, and conditions. Identity is no longer a statement, but a fluctuation—between heat and fog, between archive and future, between construction and disappearance.
And perhaps that is the only coherent image left: not a man, but a series of states.
Simone Cotellessa
