Designers rethink masculinity and the suit at Milan Fashion Week men’s

What does masculinity mean anymore? That’s the hefty sociopolitical question explored at the start of the Spring/Summer 2024 menswear season. Designers were deconstructing traditional notions of masculine dress, largely with a sense of reality and purpose rather than costume and camp, and their arguments seem to be that masculinity has already changed, and clothes have already shifted accordingly.

The conversation began with Saint Laurent. Rather than showing in Paris, the brand chose to vault the menswear season (as you can when your 2022 turnover totalled €3.3bn) and stage its catwalk show, alone, in Berlin. It was a collection remarkably free of traditional gender constraints so, say, a male model may wear a traditionally feminine halter-necked blouse with polka-dots and a chiffon lavaliere scarf in back. “Femininity and masculinity, I don’t know the limit between them,” designer Anthony Vaccarello said, and it showed. It has also become something of a rallying call for other designers, especially of note in the often machismo-drenched Milan Fashion Week.

There are sensitive souls in Milan, such as Pierpaolo Piccioli of Valentino. He declared an interest in reconsidering macho stereotypes, choosing to symbolically replace restrictive neckties with floral corsages, and to slice up trousers into shorts or skirts, and ease tailoring around the body in succulent, seemingly feminine colours — cassata green, cardinal red, blush pink, cobalt.

He also printed clothes with quotes from the author Hanya Yanagihara’s novel A Little Life, with its story of intersecting and ever-transforming male relationships: one read “We are so old, we have become young again.” That neatly sums up designers’ current fetishisation of the suit across the board, a traditional garment that, Piccioli argues, feels newly fresh and relevant for a generation that didn’t grow up stuffed into them as a corporate uniform. Plenty of designers, in fact, used the suit — a sartorial avatar of conventional masculinity, if ever there was one — to propose something new, for the new man.

Gucci, which was quietly presenting a collection designed by the studio team ahead of the September debut of new creative director Sabato De Sarno, showed suits with bracelet-length cropped sleeves, the models clutching handbags that, a decade or so ago, would’ve been considered too femme. There were plenty of suits at Dolce & Gabbana, too, alongside more three-dimensional florals, more lady-like polkadots and blouses: more gender norms upended. Most interesting were clinging tops with plissé drapery that were less reminiscent of the pumped-up bodies of Greco-Roman statues than the soigneé dresses of Parisian couturier Alix Grès, and intersected perfectly with the body-consciousness of twenty-somethings.

Jonathan Anderson chopped out V-shaped peepholes on fleshy chests and based many of his clothes on “the mundane object” — weird moulded shoes designed to recall the claw feet of Georgian furniture, wide stripes based on Cornishware, like decor captured in the back of provocative, NSFW shots. “Menswear, womenswear, whatever,” the designer said of his gender-mixed clothes that felt a precise reflection of how some young people see themselves and the world — banality mixed with a hypersexuality, skin always on show.

You always wind up back at the body when you’re talking about masculinity or femininity. It was the big focus at Prada, where Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons also embraced suiting as the foundation of their spring looks, with a wide-shouldered, narrow-waisted silhouette drawn from the 1940s. Yet their tailoring was a mirage: in actual fact, when you grabbed hold of any of the clothes, you realised the tailoring borrowed its structure from shirting, free of stiffenings and interfacings, allowing the body to move freely inside. Some were cut in fine wools, others in poplin, but they all had an exceptional lightness, which feels truly modern. Prada and Simons called it fluid architecture, and there was also a lightheartedness with a riot of colour and print — the latter evoked through fringing and piled-up floral corsages, animating two dimensions into three.

Alessandro Sartori at Zegna achieved the same ends with the opposite approach: he used tailoring techniques and fabrics on un-tailored garments. He said “new suits” are something he has been obsessed with for about three years now, and asserts that Zegna got there just as tastes shifted away from traditional forms of tailoring, to an approach of co-ordinated garments Sartori calls “modular” and may consist of colour-matched polo shirt and shorts as easily as a jacket and trousers. Sartori has a fixation with fabrication: this season, his big story is linen — 192 bales of the stuff were stacked around the audience at his show, held open-air in a piazza in the shadow of La Scala. “The cashmere of summer,” Sartori says. Zegna’s colours are great too: mint, powdery slate blue, shades of brown, blood-orange and a peach the brand calls flamingo.

Deconstructed suits, free bodies, linen — this conversation is tailor-made for Giorgio Armani, the man who first challenged and ultimately changed the suit back in the 1970s. He doesn’t lead Milan fashion, but Armani is undoubtedly its éminence grise — and there was plenty of soft grey in his Spring/Summer 2024 collection, shown a month or so before his 89th birthday. Armani’s codes were present and correct, and if his vision of masculinity seems rooted in a Herb Ritts shoot from around 1992, it still has relevance with a cadre of men around the world who don’t want revolution but rather evolution in their clothing. And that was there, in a closing quartet of dark suits that were a masterclass in how tailoring can transform the body and our perceptions of it, how clothes can make the man.

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