The Kurator's Milan Men's Fashion Week SS27 Round-up

Fashion had a moment of reckoning with itself this season. Not a crisis - nothing so dramatic - more a collective clearing of the throat. We were missing some familiar faces. The shows we'd circled in the calendar, the names we return to season after season - not all of them made it to Milan.

Gucci: absent. Fendi: absent. Zegna showed in Los Angeles, which tells you something about the current geography of ambition. The smaller the schedule, it turns out, the more each slot counts.

The calendar is fracturing. More brands are choosing destination shows over the official schedule - controlled environments, curated guest lists, the runway as a brand world rather than a competitive arena. That shift is worth noting. But so is what remains: the houses that still turn up to fashion week proper, in the city, in the heat, in the relentless forward momentum that makes this industry both exhausting and irreplaceable. The ones keeping us on our toes deserve that acknowledgement.

Giorgio Armani

The first Armani menswear show since Giorgio's passing carried a weight that no amount of careful staging could entirely absorb - nor should it have. Leo Dell'Orco, who spent four decades working beside him, responded not with grand gestures but with a devotion to what the house has always understood about dressing men well.

The show moved outside, into the open-air courtyard of Palazzo Orisini, the house's historic headquarters and Armani's former private residence - a considered choice that felt less like production design and more like instinct. The collection, titled Mercato Mediterraneo, unfolded through earthy desert tones and ocean blues, fabrics treated with salt to appear worn-in, denim processed until it resembled shantung. Rattan mats and Moroccan seating completed the scene without overstating it.

The pleated trousers, soft-shouldered tailoring and cardigan-easy jackets currently flooding menswear are, of course, things Armani invented. There is a certain satisfaction in watching an entire industry spend three seasons rediscovering a language that was always just sitting there. Dell'Orco understands that inheritance and carried it with the grace it deserved.

Dolce & Gabbana

Vacanze Siciliane. The house returns to Sicily with a frequency that might, in other hands, read as creative limitation. Here it becomes a feeling of  fluency. The collection drew from the island's cities, villages, temples, Baroque architecture, mosaics and theatres - not as a postcard but as a living, layered grammar. The show opened with nero Sicilia, black worn with the full authority of a house signature before the palette shifted: sand, limestone, sea blue, turquoise, pistachio green, shades that evoke Sicilian granita melting in afternoon heat.

Texture carried much of the collection's weight. Crochet knits, lightweight cottons, woven suede and linen. Polo shirts, jackets and classic shirting arrived as knitwear - softness folded into familiar shapes. The all-white finale brought the collection to its lightest point, models appearing in an almost suspended light. What prevents this kind of collection from tipping into a holiday brochure is exactness. The jackets sat on the body correctly. The knitwear replaced shirting rather than supplementing it.

Prada

Thirteen seasons together, and Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons are now operating like a single consciousness. Clarity - their SS27 offering - was built around jeans. Not jeans as provocation, not jeans as concept, but jeans as the most universal garment in male dress: so embedded in the wardrobe they have essentially become invisible. That invisibility was the subject, and the silhouette that followed was slim to the point of provocation - trousers cut close to the leg, cropped above the ankle, jackets shrunken to almost nothing. Julia Nobis opened the show on a transparent Perspex runway lit from beneath by fluorescent tubes, setting a narrow and exacting tempo. The internet descended into predictable chaos.

What was missed in the noise: the collection was, by Prada's own account, technically more demanding than an embroidered evening gown. Simons described the approach as "pasta pomodoro" - the most basic ingredients, executed with absolute commitment - and it is a comparison we may never forget. The classic Prada triangle logo was removed entirely from the clothing, replaced by three dots arranged in the same formation at the nape of the neck. Climbing chalk bags were reimagined in Prada nylon with carabiner clips. The brief was reduction. The wit was untouched.

Ralph Lauren

Lauren returned to Milan - Palazzo Ralph Lauren, both Polo and Purple Label, a show designed to outfit a man through his summertime pursuits. Purple Label opened with silk-blend suits in sandy neutrals and deep indigos, shifting into buttery leather jackets and pinstriped tailoring referencing the golden age of Italian racing, finished with a collaboration with Japanese label Kuon whose hand-worked sashiko embroidery added quiet authority to the tailoring. Then came Polo: madras checks, patchwork, cricket jackets and varsity staples colliding with considerably more colour and considerably more fun.

The cultural timing required no engineering. The Polo pony had already proved ubiquitous across fashion month before the show staged itself, with guests arriving in Ivy League dress codes. When a brand stops chasing the moment and the moment simply returns its calls, that is a different category of authority altogether.

Paul Smith

Smith turns 80 next month and has worn a suit almost every day of his adult life - including, by his own account, throughout pandemic lockdowns at home. That relationship with tailoring as something lived in rather than performed has always been the foundation of what he does, and SS27 was no different. Reaching into his Nottingham archive - which houses over 5,000 garments = he landed in the 1980s, when he was one of the designers leading the charge against the rigid, uniform suiting of the decades prior. The collection carried that spirit forward: shirts unbuttoned, suit cuffs pulled up, ties undone, charm jewellery featuring pewter shells and pennies evoking keepsakes from a day at the beach. The inspiration included a photograph of his grandfather wading into the sea in a suit, trousers rolled to the ankle. That image - impromptu ease, no apology - ran through everything.