The looming possibility of a Versace sale cast a long shadow over tonight’s show, turning the usual spectacle into something more charged, more uncertain. As the fashion crowd settled into the tram depot where it was staged, the murmurs were inevitable—was this Donatella Versace’s final bow? And if so, what would Versace even be without Donatella?
Just yesterday, archaeologists announced the discovery of new frescoes in Pompeii—thirty to forty A.D., depicting the initiation rites of Dionysus’s devotees. Perfect timing. Fausto Puglisi, for his part, had already decided that his latest Cavalli outing would center on Pompeii—the ancient pleasure palace of a city, decadent and doomed in equal measure, smothered in volcanic ash nearly two millennia ago. It was love at first sight for him, or so the story goes—he first visited as a child, and it stayed with him, the way ancient beauty and sudden catastrophe tend to do.
After the Prada show, a photographer—cheeky, exasperated, perhaps both—asked what, exactly, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons had been up to this season. When the answer came—“interrogating femininity,” specifically, “what is feminine beauty today?”—he snorted: “Er, double Ds.” It was a joke, obviously, but not an inaccurate one. Idealized beauty remains the defining obsession of our age, only now it’s purchasable—nipped, tucked, lasered, and filtered into a kind of eerie digital perfection, a symmetry so precise it could only exist in the uncanny valley.
If there was ever any doubt that Adrian Appiolaza is head-over-heels, madly, obsessively in love with fashion, today’s Moschino show erased it in a blizzard of confetti and a full-throttle celebration of the art, science, and pure alchemy of making clothes. At the preview, Appiolaza traced his inspiration back to Franco Moschino’s 1992 Mannequin dress—now part of the Costume Institute’s collection—a cheeky riff on the Stockman dressmaker’s dummy, except Moschino, ever the branding visionary, swapped out the Stockman logo for his own. (And for those keeping meticulous fashion history spreadsheets, yes, Moschino did it half a decade before Margiela.)
Matteo Tamburini is settling into his rhythm at Tod’s, refining the precise, pared-back aesthetic he first introduced three seasons ago. But today, his approach felt fuller—warmer, more layered, more assured. And let’s talk about the outerwear, because it was some of the best yet.
Fur has been everywhere this season—some of it good, some of it unnecessary, some of it a little too self-consciously ironic. But Etro? Etro sent out the kind you actually want to wear. Case in point: the opening look—a shaggy, near-regal wool fur coat, its bold black-and-white stripes giving just enough drama, shrugged over paisley-print trousers and a knitted waistcoat, insouciant and easy.
Milan is used to Fashion Week disruptions—the road closures, the screaming fans, the existential crisis of deciding whether last season’s Prada is still ironic enough—but today’s Dolce & Gabbana spectacle took it up a notch. Construction had shut down the tramlines outside their headquarters, so Domenico and Stefano, never ones to let a little civic inconvenience stand in the way of a moment, built their own raised stage in the street.
“I was trying to strike a balance between Jane Eyre’s iron-willed restraint and Catherine Earnshaw’s untamed, wind-swept ferocity—to find a woman who exists somewhere between these two emotional extremes.” That was Ian Griffiths’s pre-show thesis for a Max Mara collection that sought to bottle the stormy, windswept romance of the Brontëan heroines—high drama, but make it wearable.
What trick will Francesco Risso pull from his magician’s sleeve this time? That’s the anticipation a Marni show generates—every season, an unpredictable sleight of hand, a door swung open to a world that didn’t exist five minutes ago. Risso is one of those increasingly rare creatures in fashion: a true visionary, someone who doesn’t just make clothes but conjures entire universes, where quirk and craft meet in poetic, almost mystical collisions. His work is ineffable and deeply felt, lyrical yet potent—an antidote to an industry currently flailing somewhere between panic and paralysis, either chasing every trend at once or no direction at all.
No grand unveiling. No messiah in monogrammed loafers descending from the heavens to rescue Gucci from its latest existential wobble. Just another show, another placeholder, another polite nod to the fact that yes, fashion marches on, even when it’s leaderless. It’s been exactly a decade since Alessandro Michele was plucked from relative obscurity, tasked with salvaging a collection in five days flat, and in the process, rewrote the house’s entire trajectory. Sabato De Sarno? He barely had time to unpack before being unceremoniously escorted out. And for a fleeting moment, the industry held its breath—would we see another eleventh-hour savior? A seismic shift? A moment?
