A wall of water crashing through a makeshift beach at the Cité Internationale Universitaire de Paris. A fog machine swallowing Saint Laurent models whole at Men’s Fashion Week. Jonathan Anderson‘s guests picking their way through half-renovated Belle Époque salons, scaffolding, and priceless furniture coexisting in the same room. Men’s Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2027 did not lack for atmosphere. The question is whether it had too much of it.
Somewhere between Milan and Paris, two very different visions of what menswear can be staged a quiet collision. On one side: the spectacle-makers, designers who have learned that the internet does not attend fashion shows but will absolutely watch a two-minute clip of sand dunes and surfboards appearing in the middle of Paris. On the other: a smaller, quieter group insisting that the most radical thing a luxury house can do right now is make something extraordinary and let it speak for itself.
The Case for Quiet
Berluti SS27, courtesy of Berluti.
Berluti made the case for the latter with unusual force. For the third consecutive year, the Maison chose the Simone & Cino Del Duca Foundation in Paris, not a runway, not a spectacle, but a series of salons transformed into a garden. The literary companion was Antoine de Saint-Exupéry‘s The Little Prince. The centerpiece was an artisan restoring worn leather goods in front of visitors’ eyes. Berluti reported that 97 percent of its products can be repaired. In an era of viral runways and algorithmic dressing, that figure feels almost punk.
Prada arrived in Milan for Men’s Fashion Week with a similar conviction. Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons titled their collection “Clarity” and meant it. Translucent floors, fluorescent tubes laid on raw concrete, a palette that opened with disciplined black and white before cautiously allowing color. The show notes described garments “freed from extraneous detail,” designed as “a framework for ceaseless possibility.” It was the most controlled, considered presentation of the season, and also one of the hardest to reduce to a single shareable image.
When the Beach Steals the Show
Courtesy of Louis Vuitton.
That tension is not new, but it felt sharper this season for Men’s Fashion Week. When Pharrell Williams transforms a Paris courtyard into an actual beach, complete with sand, a breaking-wave installation, mist cannons, and a futuristic silver camper parked behind a dune, the clothes become one element among many. The Louis Vuitton Spring/Summer 2027 collection was genuinely accomplished: technical wetsuits alongside tailoring, salt-washed outerwear, trompe l’oeil treatments, a partnership with Coral Gardeners. But the image that will define the season is not a garment. It is a model walking through a wall of water in Paris. Berluti reported that 97 percent of its products can be repaired. In an era of viral runways and algorithmic dressing, that figure feels almost punk.
There is, of course, a false choice lurking in all of this. The best shows this season managed something more difficult: they made the environment and the clothes feel like the same idea. Anderson’s choice of the Musée Nissim de Camondo, a home suspended between renovation and remembrance, was not decoration. It was an argument about what Dior is, and what heritage means when it is treated as a living material rather than a monument. The setting did not compete with the clothes; it completed them.
Vaccarello’s fog at Saint Laurent during Paris Men’s Fashion Week served a similar purpose. Inspired by Marguerite Duras and Tina Chow, the collection proposed seduction through restraint, then wrapped the entire runway in Fujiko Nakaya‘s shifting mist, alternately concealing and revealing each look. It was theatrical, yes. It was also entirely coherent.
Milan’s Quieter Argument at Men’s Fashion Week
Courtesy of Ralph Lauren.
Milan, for its part, offered quieter pleasures. Brioni’s new Maestria bespoke program expanded personalization across fabrics, buttons, and linings. Tod’s introduced the Pashmy leather, inspired by the feel of pashmina, across a collection rooted in understated Italian craft. Ralph Lauren brought sashiko embroidery from Sashiko Gals in a limited collaboration with KUON, Japanese handicrafts meeting Italian tailoring in the middle of an American story. None of it generated a beach-in-Paris moment. All of it will last.
The honest answer to the season’s central question is probably this: craft and spectacle are not competing strategies; they are competing conversations. One happens on a runway, lasts forty minutes, and generates content. The other happens in an atelier, takes months, and generates loyalty. The brands that have figured out how to hold both at once, to make the spectacle feel earned, and the craft feel urgent, are the ones leaving Milan and Paris with something more than a good clip. They’re leaving with a point of view. And at Men’s Fashion Week right now, that may be the rarest luxury of all.
