Reality check for SS25: The everyday meets the strange in Milan

For years, Milan Fashion Week was by far the sexiest of the ‘Big Four’. Comfort was not a consideration and fashion was largely about seduction. But those days seem to be over for good – for now at least. Instead, the Milanese runways this season offered a sense of magic realism.

Spring/summer 2025 collections swung between past and future, with some designers looking through rose-tinted spectacles at bygone eras, while others followed Alice down the rabbit hole into a world of wonder. Still many chose to simply celebrate the everyday, embracing the magic of the mundane.

The everyday past

One such designer making the everyday his leitmotif and leading a shift towards wearable clothes and away from showpieces in Milan is Sabato De Sarno. The designer may have only taken the helm at Gucci a year ago, but SS25 already marks the sixth collection by the man tasked with succeeding Alessandro Michele’s whimsical, maximalist vision for the house. For some, that vision has been a sobering one. A distinct departure from Michele’s eclectic output towards the minimalism and pared-back glamour of Tom Ford’s own era at the creative helm of the brand in the nineties. 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 in the second quarter of 2024 had dropped by 20 percent year-on-year – the designer has remained steadfast in his commitment to himself and to the heritage of the house he designs for.

For SS25, that meant “casual grandeur”, as De Sarno called it, or easy-to-wear pieces inspired by images of Jackie Kennedy Onassis – the namesake of the house’s famous handbag – on holiday in Capri. The sixties were a key reference for the collection, which opened with headscarves and later featured tailored burgundy and chartreuse shift dresses. The decade’s sensibility was also present in flared coats, sequined party frocks and mini, mini dresses. Floor-length 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, provided a touch of sex appeal, as did a series of lingerie-inspired dresses and tiny bras that featured throughout the collection.

Gucci is not the only brand, and Sabato De Sarno certainly not the only designer, to have based their vision of late on a wealth of self-referential material. At Roberto Cavalli, for example, Fausto Puglisi closed his first show since the eponymous founder’s death in April with a line-up of supermodels who were favourites of the late designer. Mariacarla Boscono, Joan Smalls, Eva Herzigova, Natasha Poly, Karen Elson, Isabeli Fontana and Alek Wek took to the runway in dresses from between 2000 and 2004 that Cavalli had made for them. The emotional tribute to the man who had handpicked Puglisi as his successor was a touching one, even if it did ultimately overshadow much of Puglisi’s own designs for the house this season.

At Moschino, meanwhile, Adrian Appiolaza continued his exploration of what, exactly, makes Moschino Moschino. Delving once more into the house’s archives, he continued his journey through the brand’s back catalogue for his SS25 collection, entitled ‘Piece of Sheet’. The everyday, 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 with her, just in case of an inevitable spillage.

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

With this, the British designer embraced the liberal modernity of the twenties. The result was a collection of floaty, 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 published the same year that Fendi, then a leather goods specialist, was born.

AI, infancy and the question of age

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

The duo produced a collection for SS25 that was a direct response to the micro-trends and ever-changing tides of fashion created by online algorithms. Rather than latching onto or even kickstarting a single trend, however, Prada’s latest, entitled ‘Infinite Present’, attempted to unpick the rules of chronology while making clothes for the age of the algorithm. The result was a collection that, at times, felt disjointed, but that was precisely the point of a collection that seemed to be more of a mishmash of fashion moments than a curated edit.

If anything, it was as if Prada and Simons had put the house’s archive on shuffle and allowed a stream of algorithmically-generated looks to emerge, free from any fixed style or era. The duo also played with time and questioned chronology, as iconic pieces from the Prada archive, be they shoes from 1996, 2012 and 2011 or narrow belts and dresses from spring/summer 2024, suddenly reappeared on the runway.

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

Matthieu Blazy, meanwhile, seemed to have turned off his phone, or indeed any technology, at Bottega Veneta and embraced instead the childlike wonder and beauty of the everyday. The designer made his point – and left his mark on social media – with his choice of seating for the show, swapping out benches or chairs for low-slung leather ottomans in the shape of animals. Each animal was reportedly chosen to represent the guest sitting on it, but regardless, the whimsical choice transformed the venue into a playground before a single look had even hit the runway.

For SS25, Blazy designed a collection dedicated to the inner child, with oversized silhouettes often resembling children who had raided their parents’ dressing-up box. The result was a playful, oversized collection that romanticised the everyday. Shopping bags, florals and office attire rubbed shoulders with checked shirts and animal-printed T-shirts. There was a sense of dressing up and experimenting, not least because the looks were often oversized, crumpled and messy. Yet Blazy did all this without alienating those who have come to know Bottega Veneta as a house of quietly refined, streamlined pieces with an exceptional focus on texture and shape. For them, he offered precisely tailored shirting and suiting, draped jersey dresses and a fringed coat that by now has 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 regular expectations and conventions,” the designer wrote in his show notes for SS25. “The door is open to the possibility of strange realities and wonders.”

And while his words were certainly intended 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. At the end of the day, the possibilities, or rather the doors, for creativity and its endless stream of strange, wonderful, powerful and imaginative possibilities remain wide open; let’s just hope they stay that way.