It’s telling that on the final day of the autumn/winter 2025 menswear collections, Simon Porte Jacquemus made a sudden departure. The showman who had previously taken over entire lavender fields in the south of France and hilltop villages in Capri decided instead to hold an intimate presentation of monochromatic dresses in Auguste Perret’s former home in Paris. “I want to bare myself before you, without artifice,” read the designer’s shownotes, in what felt like a subtle riposte to what has already been an overwhelming fortnight of stuff and things.
To recap: the autumn/winter 2025 season kicked off on 14 January and will continue until 3 March – during which time editors will have travelled from Pitti Uomo in Florence, to Milan and Paris for the men’s shows (where the fashion set will remain for a week of Haute Couture presentations) before flying to New York and London, and back again to Milan and Paris, for the final leg of women’s collections. There are also alternative fashion weeks like Berlin and Copenhagen that take place in between, increasingly given the same press treatment as traditional capitals.
The antidote to all this noise lies in you. In cultivating your likes and dislikes. In being discerning about what you give your precious (and it really is precious) attention towards. In developing a critical eye. Because there is much to admire from fashion if you adjust the lens. Dior’s funereal pulse; the mental aphrodisiacs stirred up between Mrs Prada and Raf Simons; Willy Chavarria’s cast walking to the speech Bishop Mariann Budde’s made to Donald Trump; everything Martine Rose does, but mostly how she discovers beauty in places where others can’t. Here are six things to remember from the men’s autumn/winter 2025 shows. (You might find something you love… or better still, something you don’t.)
Prada swore in a new world disorder
“I’m interested in seeing how it comes together,” said one critic after previewing Prada’s autumn/winter 2025 collection 24 hours before the rest of us. “I’m not quite sure how it will look as a whole.” That comment, uncharacteristically hesitant from this particular enthusiast, hinted at the unconventional grab bag of characters that would later travel through a three-storey warren of scaffolding at Fondazione Prada. There were piped pyjama sets and rough-patched leather suiting; high-shine gilets and ivory silk tailoring; children’s tops in 1970s camper-van florals and bombers collared with rugged pelts of shearling. Pretty much everything had been anchored to slim-cut trousers and scuffed cowboy boots. “Prada man was breaking down then putting on multiple looks in the lexicon – from caveman to cowboy to businessman and more – all at once, apparently with scant regard for the conventions of context, image or intention,” said Vogue’s Luke Leitch. Backstage, Miuccia Prada described it thus: “It is a bit of an answer, as always, to what is happening,” she said. “So we have to resist with our instinct, and our humanity, and our passion, and our hands in a world that is becoming so conservative.” It was the most covetable collection of the entire menswear season.
Kim Jones presented his best Dior collection yet
It was a collection that rivalled Kim Jones’s autumn/winter 2017 proposal in standing ovations alone, back when he unveiled a Supreme collaboration with Dior that would inculcate an entire era of streetwear partnerships. But the designer’s autumn/winter 2025 collection was his most beautiful to date. “The customer wants to see something new,” he told the press backstage. “Fashion’s gotten very, very fast. I think social media has made people’s attention span very, very short, and so hype can sometimes win over craft.” And so, Kim stripped things back to source: drawing on the architecture of Dior’s “H-Line” haute couture collection of autumn/winter 1954 in linear tailoring with tucked waists, pink silk faille swing coats and belted kimonos. And, as rumours continued to swirl around Dior’s all-but-confirmed leadership changes, Jones sent his models into a symbolic unknown, their eyes obscured by blindfold ribbons, as if nobly accepting their fate. Not long after the house lights dimmed on his autumn/winter 2025 presentation, friends and admirers of Jones (including Anna Wintour, Kate Moss, Gwendoline Christie, Robert Pattinson, Lulu Kennedy and Rick Owens) gathered to see the designer knighted as a Chevalier de la Légion d’Honneur – France’s highest civilian award.