It’s Raining Menswear: Runway Returns, Notable Debuts Fill January Calendar

To receive the Vogue Business newsletter, sign up here.

The return of Gucci and Saint Laurent to Milan, Martine Rose at Pitti, and Emily (Bode) in Paris: January’s menswear schedules are jostling with standouts and surprises.

The season will kick off on 10 January at trade show Pitti in Florence before moving to Milan three days later. It will conclude in Paris on 22 January, with Maison Margiela’s menswear show, John Galliano’s first in four years. Scheduled for 8pm, it’s designed to keep menswear editors in town until the very end and attract those arriving for the start of Couture Week on 23 January.

Pitti, Milan and Paris continue to draw key designers from the US and UK, thanks in part to the decline of standalone in-season menswear schedules in New York and London, where the focus on menswear always seemed secondary when presented alongside womenswear. Apart from Martine Rose, who is Pitti’s guest designer for the season, these include Charles Jeffrey Loverboy showing live for the first time in Milan and JW Anderson returning, as well as the highly regarded US designer Emily Adams Bode, who will hold her first Paris show since the pandemic. Rhude, Amiri, Bianca Saunders and Samuel Ross (who will host a presentation for A-Cold-Wall) are also returning. And Grace Wales Bonner will be staging a live show in Paris for the first time.

The two most-anticipated shows of the season, however, will see Italian and French menswear powerhouses returning to their respective home turf in very different circumstances. When Gucci rejoins the Milan schedule with a show at 2pm local time on 13 January, it will be almost eight years to the day since a then-unknown (and unconfirmed as creative director) Alessandro Michele presented what would be his first show for the house. Now that Gucci is between creative captains once again, the audience will be similarly agog to discover the author of its next chapter. Once in Paris, that same audience will also be on watch for a new designer at Louis Vuitton, which is yet to name a successor to Virgil Abloh.