Overall, Milan Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2025 evokes optimism, hope, brightness, and maturity, with a dash of futurism (Prada), playfulness (Marni), heritage (Fendi), craftsmanship (Bottega Veneta, Tod’s), and escapism (many others). Here’s everything you need to know. Cover image: courtesy of Gucci
BEST OF LONDON FASHION WEEK SPRING/SUMMER 2025
MILAN FASHION WEEK SPRING/SUMMER 2025
Overall, Milan Fashion Week brought back the fun, joy, and risk-taking to the runway. Prada and Bottega Veneta were unmistakably the shows of the season, showing bold colors, historical references, and new directions for the industry. Prada’s collection was a legacy collection; its accessories were oddly beautiful, strange, and weird, and the shoes appealed to quiet luxury fans. Pure joy, a little weirdness, and a dash of fun: Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons know how far they can stretch Prada’s designs by now. They set the tone for the rest of the week.
Adrian Appiolaza showed his third collection for Moschino, including sailor hats and nautical influences, which were also part of Marni’s show—one of its best in years. Francesco Risso, sometimes called fashion’s Willy Wonka, made a name for himself and the brand by developing a fairytale-worthy collection with an adult note. Sabato de Sarno’s third season for Gucci is talked about as his best to date, while others think his work resonates with what he did at Valentino. Discover everything you need to know below.
HISTORIAL REFERENCING SHAPE A MODERN WARDROBE
Fendi kicked off Milan Fashion Week, celebrating its 100th anniversary during Milan Fashion Week. “The foundations of how women dress today and, in many ways, how we think are in the 1920s. It’s about modernity in style and attitude,” says Kim Jones, Artistic Director of Couture and Womenswear. “1925 has so many milestone moments. It is the founding year of Fendi, but also the year of the Art Deco exhibition in Paris – The International Exhibition of Modern Decorative and Industrial Arts – from where the name is taken. Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby are also published. There’s modernism in dress, design, decoration, and thought. We approached the collection with these things in mind, as an amalgam of epochs, moods, and techniques – then and now.” It came together without compromising on quality, Silvia Venturini Fendi added. “Quality is the number one point besides the beauty of design. I always think about the connection between fashion and time – quality is the defining feature. It is the timeless testament to what has been achieved in our hundred-year history. As the founder of Fendi, it was also my grandmother Adele’s personal and professional obsession: quality.” To further emphasize the past century of the house, creative director Kim Jones collaborated with the four generations of women who shaped it. Adele Fendi opened the first shop in 1925, and daughter Anna – Silvia Venturini Fendi’s mother – discussed the collection’s course; Silvia designed the accessories, while Delfina, her daughter, created the jewelry. A true family affair, one could say, and it showed. No recent collection echoes Fendi more than this one. Kim Jones, in charge of the clothes, was a skillful editor overseeing the entire collection and ensuring everything would make sense together. He held together Fendi’s signature craft, color palette, and the house’s attitude. Drop-waist dresses with art Deco references formed the perfect foundation for celebrating their centenary, where shearling robes, crocodile suede T-shirts, and skirts brought the collection to the present.
At Jil Sander, strength, inspiration, imagination, the ability to find affinities among different things, and understanding how these affinities illuminate a subject formed the common thread of the collection. Creative duo Luke and Lucy Meier used an uncanny place, suspension, the interplay between our inner and outer lives as one of their most important sources of inspiration. And so, their silhouettes and shapes are more focused on the real world or grounded, if you wish. Low boots, the creased salaryman moccasins, sandals, the new metal Cannolo bag, and the small and large briefcases are strong, sculptural, and bold. The shoulders of jackets and coats are wider when it comes to fit. Combined with their signature slender and long trousers, they are soft and voluminous. The black embossed or shiny leather, a floral shiny raincoat, turns a certain romantic seediness into urban sophistication. After all, this collection is a perfect example of what the brand’s heritage and the creative duo excel at—an ideal match, so to say.
NEW DEFINITIONS
For Alberta Ferretti, making fashion is a constant question to find a balance between the reasons of creation and the reality of the women she dresses. Inclined towards dreams and always towards lightness, she is aware that these cannot be an escape from reality, an exercise in style. The clothes she imagines are designed to become part of the daily horizon, to be lived here and now. They are not costumes and are not exhausted in the flash of social media; they foresee real situations and sincere interactions. This is her belief: sincere, again, and never commanding. With a lightness that, if possible, is even more decisive for summer 2025, Alberta Ferretti proposes an impalpable, weightless collection in which twists, wrinkles, and laser cuts create a sense of airy preciousness. To the bling that rages everywhere, she offsets the taste for moving and iridescent monochrome, enhanced by the finesse of manual workmanship. It is a new lightness of being in pale and natural tones with sunny accents of orange and some black, in which blazers are replaced by vaporous wide blouses, shirts become longer, transparent skirts reveal shorts, and warm-toned stripes punctuate the silhouette.
Now that Sabato de Sarno has taken the creative helm for the third season, what makes Gucci Gucci? There was a hint of the Tom Ford era’s seduction in the form of a long white dress. Then there were voluminous mini skirts, which undoubtedly have a similar effect on street style as Miu Miu’s earlier version. Mushia Lundström, the Newsflash founder, noted that besides the more casual looks, De Sarno should focus more on eveningwear – one of his biggest strengths, shown on big stars such as Taylor Swift and Lily Gladstone. Gucci’s gone Valentino (where De Sarno worked under the helm of Pierpaolo Piccioli), and his predecessor is now at Valentino’s creative helm. They swept styles, Lundström argues, and that doesn’t have to be a bad thing, as long as their customers get it. After the long tenure of Alessandro Michele at Gucci, it was time for a revival of the brand. We get it; Michele’s take on the Italian house was great, but Gucci needed to step up its game with archival pieces of its Tom Ford era going viral in the industry. And that might have been De Sarno’s task when he got the job: revitalizing the house in a modernized way that echoed the brand’s past. And in our opinion, he does a great job. There is no repetitiveness, just enviably good collections. Overall, it was clear De Sarno had fun. He was laughing on the runway, hugging his dearest front-row guests, and joking with the models backstage. “This collection shows an accomplished construction journey,” De Sarno explained. “Moment after moment, I have built my ideas for Gucci. A casual grandeur (the collection’s theme, TT) that takes shape through my obsessions – tailoring, lingerie, leather, 60’s silhouettes, all combined with the tireless exploration of the heritage of this brand – and always with an irreverent attitude.”
BEST IN CLASS
The best-in-class prize goes to Diesel, among others. “There is beauty in waste, in what is distressed and destroyed. It’s in the circularity of denim waste and the distress we build into the collection. This is the disruption of Diesel: we are pushing for circularity in our production as hard as we push the elevation of design,” Glenn Martens, creative director of the brand, explained. The future of Diesel is circularity, a commitment to finding synergistic ways to reuse materials. For instance, denim waste is repurposed to create denim rolls used in the automotive and insulation sectors. After the show, the entire set will be reused and repurposed. The runway was covered with 14,800kg (32,628.415 lb) of denim scraps to emphasize their new mission. “Diesel is denim,” an AI voice further explained, because Diesel’s roots and core will always circle back to where it all started. About 80% of this collection’s looks consisted of repurposed denim pieces, which is quite an achievement for a brand of the size of Diesel.
Together with Bottega Veneta (which we will come to later), Prada showed the best collection of the season – or, as fashion critic Timothy Chernyaev expressed it: “Probably my favorite Prada show since 2016. […] There’s an aura of class consciousness in the air. And when that happens, fashion tends to become about aligning yourself with opulence. The language has been centered around stealth wealth, quiet luxury, and related themes for years. But if you want to make a name for yourself in art and design, you must be fearless. And Miuccia Prada is fearless.” He calls the collection random, disorganized, partly deeply conventional, and profoundly beautiful. And that’s what it is: a perfect modern mess with a hint of retro references and unmistakable Miuccia Prada. It’s a mixture of Pierre Cardin’s Space Age, Mary Quant’s daring designs, and colors that may refer to the fifties and sixties of last century.
Then, Matthieu Blazy’s collection for Bottega Veneta became a category on its own. “As a kid, there is the adventure of the everyday – there’s a feeling that anything could happen, no matter how fantastical, and regular expectations and conventions do not so bind us. The door opens to the possibility of strange realities and wonder, impossible scenarios that banish disillusion. This is about the power of sincerity over strategy,” Matthieu Blazy explained about Bottega Veneta’s Spring/Summer 2025 show. And so, Blazy focuses on power dressing with a fresh, unexpected twist—channeling the energy of sincerity, playful charm, and effortlessly chic awkwardness. It’s about characters using fashion to rediscover their identity, embracing who they once were while evolving into something entirely new. It’s safe to call the collection a sartorial coming-of-age, a journey of self-realization expressed through the lens of Bottega Veneta.
