Gucci’s new look, and other highlights from Milan Fashion Week

The bottom line was the focus of the autumn/winter 2023 menswear shows in Milan. I mean that both figuratively — there was the overarching trend to tug the hem of overlong overcoats to end either around the lower shin or dragging a few inches behind you in the muck — and literally, evident in a focus on tailoring, sombre colour, staple garments, quality fabrics and asserting individual brand identities.

Those elements were ticked off in the collection that Gucci showed on Friday — the label’s return to the menswear calendar after a three-year hiatus and the first designs debuted by the in-house team following the departure of creative director Alessandro Michele in November.

There was an inevitable interregnum feel to this Gucci collection, a quietness: the collection was shorn of Michele’s wit and playfulness, and instead offered serviceable and slick tailoring, alongside sportswear and plenty of logos.

As is usually the case in moments like this, the house dug into its archives, referencing both Michele’s work — his bestselling Dionysus bag got a re-workout — and the leathers and sexiness of his lauded 1990s predecessor Tom Ford. There were also ’80s throwbacks — leg warmers, cavalier boots and bit-and-buckle silk scarf prints that referenced the label’s time in fashion’s hinterland — as well as hefty, desirable sacks of leather with piston hardware. Overall, this was a salutary effort executed in uncertain circumstances. There will no doubt be a customer both for the collection’s elegantly louche suit jackets and its blinged-out jeans. But it remains to be seen which of those dual and seemingly duelling aesthetics — classic suiting versus zingy sportswear — Gucci will nail to its mast as a new identity to reignite its well-reported slowing turnover.

A few brands seem to be shedding old skins and shifting to the new, or vice versa. Dean and Dan Caten at Dsquared2 returned to the very particular breed of flashy, trashy, dumb-but-fun sportswear (chopped-up tube-sock and jockstrap webbing, chewed-out denims, trucker caps and diamanté) that they excelled at about 15 years ago. It was silly but exhilarating, and marked a giddy return to form.

And following a few seasons flailing after Gen Z customers, Domenico Dolce and Stefano Gabbana decided to cut a suit — and another suit, and a swirling cape, and lots of floor-length coats that looked vaguely ecclesiastical, in a black they compared to Sicilian volcanic ash. It was elegant, perhaps too elegant, their collection swaying towards the costume rack of the brittle hero of a Visconti epic. A plump-hipped ivory evening suit with matching gloves is a tough sell in 2023.

Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons titled their collection directly “Let’s Talk About Clothes”. Meaning that, as a pneumatic ceiling rose and then fell 30ft or so to shift the scale of the brand’s vast runway space in Prada’s Milanese art foundation, we were encouraged to ally this motion not to vacillating stock markets or biblical sky-falling doom, but rather to the changing volumes of the clothes themselves. Forget the apocalypse, look at those hemlines!

Actually, Miuccia Prada has always made a point of using her status as a fashion designer to comment on global situations — one of very few designers to do so. For her, it’s an essential part of the job. “We always talk about reality, and we, as designers, are very aware of what is happening, the problems, the difficulties,” she said backstage. “It is a complicated moment in the world — and we react to it. The most honest thing we can do is to create something useful for people today.” There was a sense of usefulness to these clothes, garments that Simons called “familiar, archetypal clothing”. They pumped jackets up to massive, oversized proportions, stuffing them with duvet wadding to create a couture-influenced, almost entirely spherical silhouette above a tightly defined waist. Prada also yanked out traditional menswear staples such as duffel coats, parkas or donkey jackets to that season-defining ankle-length, while all around this they proposed precise tailoring with nifty button-off collars in scraps of mohair and fragments of Prada prints past.

This was an adroit example of a brand marrying its legacy with long-term future aspirations: Prada is currently undergoing a generational shift, in preparation for Miuccia Prada and Patrizio Bertelli’s son Lorenzo becoming group CEO in the next few years. The confidence of Prada’s financial outlook was absolutely reflected in the energy of these clothes.

The other two strong shows of Milan were Zegna and Armani. Gen Z is the other end of the alphabet from Armani, and he doesn’t care whether or not they want beaded evening tuxedos (for him) or muted knits, or nubby tweeds. Because he knows plenty of people will. In a season of great coats, Armani’s were the greatest — a bunch of swirling balmacaans of impeccable cut. Whether you’re 18 or 89 — as Giorgio Armani turns this year — you’d wear them, and look great in them.

The young pretender, perhaps, to Armani’s throne is Alessandro Sartori of Zegna. He shares Armani’s refined sensibility for fabrics, as well as his early urge to deconstruct and soften tailoring to make it modern. Sartori’s suits at Zegna this time appeared sharply tailored, but were actually created through layered fabric — double, even triple — rather than canvas interfacing. Sartori said this aided the company in its urge to recycle as many materials as possible — it’s trickier to tug garments apart if they’re stitched with canvas. And many garments here were made of recycled textiles, to give them grainy textures and mélange finishes of multiple muted tones.

Yet it was the clothes themselves — their design, rather than their materials — that were worth writing about: the ease of cardigans translated into double-face cashmere tailoring; bulky knitwear rendered weightless; suits sliced with raw edges; colours churning through buttermilks, grey, flashes of bright red. And Sartori’s easy, wide-trouser silhouette looked terrific. It was the finishing flourish to some of the most quietly exciting clothes of a quietly strong Milan season.