Milan Fashion Week 2025: all the key trends

“We like to take a risk,” Simons said after the show. “We like to create something different.”

What was striking was how familiar it all seemed — again, knowingly so. Retro sports jackets and grubby tennis shoes that looked as though they had been picked up second-hand; shearling coats treated to look like vintage-shop sable.

Sweaters and knitted dresses came oversized — like baggy hand-me-downs — as did Sixties-esque tweedy tunic dresses and princess coats, whose artfully mangled seams and scrunched paper-bag waists gave the impression they’d been DIY altered to fit.

The resulting off-kilter elegance was proof of this label’s unrivalled — if slightly baffling to outsiders — ability to synthesise cool from the most unexpected ingredients.

At Max Mara, the British designer Ian Griffiths was inspired by the Brontë sisters’ romantic heroines — though his version was robed in cashmere, and their hiking-soled brogues boasted chunky heels.

He suggested that the label’s squad of international power dressers — which includes Kamala Harris and Nancy Pelosi — channel their inner Cathy Earnshaw while the global storm rages.

“I didn’t want it to look like a BBC costume drama,” Griffiths said backstage. “This woman is more likely to be marching through the corridors of powers than the Yorkshire moors.”

She might set off on her expedition in any of the quilted gilet coats, hooded capes and knitwear. These were layered in tonal looks of deep and rusty shades of furze brown and a paler shade of stone known as kasha. Long or wrapped circle skirts and high-waisted, wide-leg Hepburn pants teamed with woollen waistcoats were nipped in with masculine belts. “As though you’d found Heathcliff’s and put it on,” Griffiths explained.

The palette was more sombre — reminiscent of an LS Lowry worker — than the louche and slouchy jet-set camel that is the label’s usual stock in trade and has become a universal signifier of so-called quiet luxury in recent seasons. Capable and outdoorsy-looking rucksacks worn with knitted blazers and pencil skirts added to the sense of getting away from it all.

Rather than looking forward, Fendi reflected on seasons past in a show that kicked off celebrations for its centenary year.

Here is yet another Italian megabrand between designers this season, but the LVMH-owned house saw in its hundredth year on Wednesday in the care of the family’s third generation. Silvia Venturini Fendi’s vision for autumn 2025 was a reimagining of her grandparents’ original boutique in Rome, as visited by Fellini and the Italian Cinecitta A-list in the Fifties.

She built the collection around her mother Anna’s memories of playing there with her four sisters — and of her own debut, aged seven, on the brand’s catwalk and in an advertising campaign in 1968.

That was the year the brand first introduced the chevron panelling that has since become a signature on clothes, outerwear and its many It-bags. It was replicated for next season in shearling, sequins and wool on skirts, coats and knitwear.

“That collection is very dear to me,” Silvia Fendi explained backstage. “It was the first time I understood what my mother was doing [at work] and that I wanted to be part of it.”

“I didn’t want to spend much time dwelling on the archives. Instead I looked for what the family call ‘Fendi-ness’ — you either have it or you don’t.”

That translated to a wardrobe mash-up of soignee and playful: severe tailoring tempered by feminine flourishes in fluid skirts, and paillette-strewn dresses in a palette of pink, brown and brick red, inspired by the store’s original interiors.

Models including the Brit supers Yasmin Le Bon and Penelope Tree walked through a recreation of its arched doorway on Rome’s Via Bergognone, welcomed in by the fifth generation of Fendi grandchildren.

The brand’s top job is yet another currently vacant in this latest round of industry musical chairs (Gucci is rudderless for now, too), since the British talent Kim Jones left in October after four years. Before him, Karl Lagerfeld was in the role for 54 of Fendi’s 100 years, during which he developed the house from a stolid Roman fur house to an internationally recognised luxury titan.

“Karl never wanted to repeat himself or have a retrospective,” Silvia Fendi said. “So I’m calling this collection flashbacks and flash-forwards. I thought that was the best homage to him.”

At Gucci, it is the season even beyond that to which industry eyes are turning — after the sudden exit of its creative director Sabato De Sarno this month, all the chat on the front row was of who might take up the top job.

Results shared shortly after De Sarno’s departure showed that Gucci’s operating profit was down 51 per cent from last year. Revenue at its parent company Kering was down 12 per cent in the same time. Its chief executive François-Henri Pinault — aka Mr Salma Hayek — needs a hit.

For now, the autumn 2025 collection shown by the Florence-based megabrand on Tuesday in Milan, was credited instead to its “design office”. That the studio team turned out in matching green sweatshirts to take their bow at the end — the same Wicked shade of emerald in which the catwalk venue was curtained and carpeted — was proof enough of new shoots.

De Sarno’s two-year tenure foregrounded a sanguine “rosso ancora” shade of red that failed to stir shoppers’ blood. Whoever next takes the reins will be making notes.

From reins to the label’s signature horse-bit, which featured heavily on bags, necklaces and even in prints, this interim collection aimed to blend various elements of Gucci’s previous success stories into a season’s worth of commercially savvy “merch” to bolster the numbers for now.

Mini and A-line shift dresses, princess coats and skirt suits evoked the Sixties, when the label first introduced clothing alongside its bags, aviator specs and (fake) fur whispered of the Seventies, when the interlocking GG logo was born.

Satin slip dresses, ravey brights and cropped mohair twinsets seemed to merge Gen Z sensibilities with Nineties references, a decade in which the designer Tom Ford made Gucci the sexiest brand in the world.

Onwards through the timeline and there was a smattering of the geek-chic magpie tendency that next made this the most popular label in the industry for almost a decade under Alessandro Michele, who left in 2022. A sheer diamante-scattered bodystocking, giant fluffy shearling tote and classic horse-bit bags rendered in ice-cream pastels seem to nod to his wry Margot Tenenbaum-like take on vintage cool.

What were missing were the wardrobe items that De Sarno prioritised and which critics decried as “Zara clothes” — jeans, blazers, classic trenchcoats. Instead, tailored jackets were cropped and stylised, while coats came in punchy shades of mustard and violet as well as iridescent mother-of-pearl leather.

Different to what you might find elsewhere, in other words, and that seems like strategy enough, for now.