Het alledaagse ontmoet het vreemde in Milaan

For years, Milan Fashion Week was by far the sexiest of the Big Four. Comfort wasn’t a priority and fashion was all about seduction. But those days seem to be over – for now, anyway. Instead, Milan’s catwalks this season offered a sense of magical realism.

The spring/summer 2025 collections teetered between past and future, with some designers looking back at times gone by through rose-tinted glasses, while others followed Alice down the rabbit hole into a world of wonder. Yet many chose to simply celebrate the everyday and embrace the magic of the ordinary.

The everyday past

One such designer making the everyday his leitmotif, and leading a shift in Milan toward wearable clothing and away from showpieces, is Sabato De Sarno. The designer may have only taken the helm at Gucci a year ago, but SS25 marks the sixth collection from the man tasked with succeeding Alessandro Michele’s whimsical, maximalist vision for the house. For some, it’s been a sobering one. A marked departure from Michele’s eclectic output, moving toward the minimalism and pared-back glamour of Tom Ford’s own era at the creative helm of the brand in the 1990s. And while much can be said about De Sarno’s vision for Gucci and the success it has yet to achieve—in July, it was reported that Gucci’s sales were down 20 percent year-on-year in the second quarter of 2024—the designer has remained steadfast in his commitment to himself, and to the legacy of the house he designs for.

For SS25, that meant “casual grandeur,” as De Sarno called it, or wearable pieces inspired by images of Jackie Kennedy Onassis—the namesake of the house’s famous handbag—vacationing in Capri. The Sixties were a key reference for the collection, which opened with headscarves and later showed fitted burgundy and chartreuse shift dresses. The decade’s sensibility was also present in flared coats, sequined party dresses and mini, mini dresses. Long coats were worn with jeans and tank tops, while sharp tailoring also made an appearance. His take on Tom Ford’s famous cut-out jersey dresses from 1996, meanwhile, added a touch of sexiness, as did a series of lingerie-inspired dresses and tiny bras seen throughout the collection.

Gucci isn’t the only brand, and Sabato De Sarno certainly isn’t the only designer, to have grounded his vision in a wealth of self-referential material of late. At Roberto Cavalli, Fausto Puglisi closed his first show since the eponymous founder’s death in April with a lineup of supermodels favored by the late designer. Mariacarla Boscono, Joan Smalls, Eva Herzigova, Natasha Poly, Karen Elson, Isabeli Fontana, and Alek Wek walked the runway in dresses made for them by Cavalli between 2000 and 2004. The emotional tribute to the man Puglisi had personally hand-picked as his successor was touching, even if it ultimately overshadowed many of Puglisi’s own designs for the house this season.

At Moschino, Adrian Appiolaza continued his quest to find out what makes Moschino Moschino. He delved into the house’s archives once again, continuing his journey through the brand’s back catalogue for his SS25 collection, titled ‘Piece of Sheet’. The mundane, in this case crisp white bed linen, was transformed into a series of dresses and separates, with one model even carrying a bottle of bleach, just in case of spills.

Fendi, on the other hand, had every reason to look back on its own past, as the house will celebrate its 100th anniversary in 2025. Yet for SS25, Kim Jones chose to look back on the decade in which the house was founded, rather than its actual founding story.

In doing so, the British designer embraced the liberal modernity of the 1920s. The result was a collection of flowing, flapper-inspired dresses and literary references to novels such as Virginia Woolf’s Mrs Dalloway and F. Scott Fitzgerald’s The Great Gatsby, both of which were released in the same year that Fendi, then a leather goods specialist, was founded.

AI, childhood and the age question

Although Jones has often woven literature into his clothes – previous collections, for example, included references to the bohemian Bloomsbury set – the real powerhouses of intellectualism in Milan remain Raf Simons and Miuccia Prada.

For SS25, the duo produced a collection that was a direct response to the microtrends and ever-changing tides of fashion created by online algorithms. Rather than tapping into or even initiating a single trend, Prada’s latest, titled ‘Infinite Present’, sought to unravel the rules of chronology while simultaneously making clothes for the age of the algorithm. The result was a collection that felt disjointed at times, but that was precisely the point of a collection that felt more like a hodgepodge of fashion moments than a curated version.

It was as if Prada and Simons had put the house’s archive on shuffle, creating a stream of algorithmically generated looks, free of any fixed style or era. The duo also played with time, questioning chronology as iconic pieces from Prada’s archive, whether shoes from 1996, 2012 and 2011 or skinny belts and dresses from spring/summer 2024, suddenly reappeared on the runway.

Glitches in the matrix, or rather the inaccuracies of artificial intelligence (AI), were also present in the collection. Not in the form of frozen screens, but in stiff, upright collars and sleeves, and trompe l’oeil details, such as fur collars and belts that on closer inspection turned out to be nothing more than flat leather prints, an optical illusion.

Matthieu Blazy, meanwhile, appeared to have turned off his phone—or indeed all technology—at Bottega Veneta, instead embracing the childlike wonder and beauty of the mundane. The designer made his point—and left his mark on social media—with his seating choices for the show, replacing benches or chairs with low-cut leather ottomans shaped into animals. Each animal was said to have been chosen to represent the guest sitting on it, but either way, the whimsical choice transformed the venue into a playground before a single look had even strutted down the runway.

For SS25, Blazy designed a collection dedicated to the inner child, with oversized silhouettes that often resembled kids who’d raided their parents’ dressing-up box. The result was a playful, oversized collection that romanticized the everyday. Shopping bags, floral prints, and office attire were mixed with checked shirts and animal-print tees. There was a sense of dress-up and experimentation in the air, not least because the looks were often oversized, creased, and messy. Yet Blazy did all this without alienating those who’ve come to know Bottega Veneta as a house of pared-back, streamlined pieces with an exceptional focus on texture and form. For them, he offered precisely tailored shirts and suits, draped jersey dresses, and a fringed coat that’s become almost synonymous with Bottega.

“As a child, one experiences the adventure of the everyday – one feels that anything can happen, no matter how fantastic, and one is less bound by fixed expectations and conventions,” the designer wrote in his SS25 show notes. “The door is open to the possibility of strange realities and wonders.”

And while his words were certainly meant to describe his own collection, they also make a statement about the state of fashion as a whole – with all its uncertainties and challenges at the moment. Ultimately, the possibilities, or rather the doors, for creativity and its endless stream of weird, wonderful, powerful and imaginative possibilities remain wide open; let’s hope they stay that way.

The translation was subsequently edited by Sylvana Lijbaart.