Where’s the Fashion at Men’s Fashion Week?

At the shows, at dinner, in cafes over wine, everyone talked about wearability during the Fall 2024 collections. But where’s the line between banality and functionality?

“I prefer seeing wearable clothes on the runway.”

As recently as three years ago, a statement like this could get you exiled from the fashion scene. Yet when a friend told me this plainly before a show at Paris Fashion Week, no one in the vicinity even raised an eyebrow, let alone turned their heads to observe who had voiced such a vulgar opinion.

It was day 11 of menswear shows from Florence to Milan to Paris. Eleven days of elegant blazers (Dior Men, AMIRI, Dries Van Noten), gorgeous color palettes (Magliano, AURALEE, JW Anderson), and a resurgence of neckties (Botter and even Kiko Kostadinov, who fused a tie shape into a pullover). It was starting to feel like reasonable, viable, and wearable clothes were the big—if not —story of the Fall/Winter 2024 menswear season.Even brands with a dramatic theme, like the rodeo reverie at Louis Vuitton, used narrative in service of functionality, spotlighting denim, workwear, and covetable leather accessories. Wherever you looked on the runways and in the showrooms, you would find stunning, pretty, clothes with just a twinkle of flair.Let’s rewind for a second. In 2020, I headlined ’s fall menswear trend report “No Normal Clothes.” It was the season where Virgil Abloh created a bomber jacket in the shape of Paris’s cityscape, Demna dressed Eliza Douglas as a medieval knight, and Pigalle layered dozens of hoodies on a single model. A season later, the biggest trends were skirts on men and near-total nudity. Subversion became the norm: By 2022, a head would barely turn for a guy in a corset at Palomo Spain or Thom Browne. Over the past two weeks, fashion has pivoted so sharply on its heel, you could get whiplash. One friend, a couple of pastas and wines deep in Milan, half-heartedly joked, “The binary is back!” Which is to say, the vast, exciting ideas and progress around gender and identity that played out on the catwalk, challenging the darkest days of the COVID pandemic and the Trump presidency, can feel absent looking at the Fall/Winter 2024 shows, replaced instead by subtler gestures of power and intent.For the menswear whizzes, this isn’t necessarily a bad thing. Walking down Rivoli, I ran into Alexander Roth, the creative and social media star, who explained that maybe this return to “normalcy” is in fact a reflection of our times. “I feel like the current economic climate and political climate relates directly back to what we have seen on the runway in a positive way,” he said. “Instead of the clothes being a costume, you have to think more about the clothes, the mystery behind them, and why they were shown the way they were.”

It’s true, since 2020 we have been facing an increasingly bleak global landscape, and instead of offering dramatic escapism or hopefulness, the menswear collections of Fall/Winter 2024 offer beautiful and more intimate ways to relate to yourself. The real freak flag is what’s inside of you. Even Rick Owens, the king of a grand gesture, opted for something more tender this season, showing his resplendent collection of body-hugging jumpsuits and furry wraps inside his own home. He called the gesture of a smaller show, with more repetition within the collection, “a respectful move in observance of the barbaric times through which we are living.”

So rather than bang on about what we’re missing, think of these fluffy knits, belted wrap coats, and cropped prim jackets as clothing that lets you showcase yourself. “What’s fun about this moment in men’s fashion, and what we saw in Milan and Paris, is ‘wearable’ clothing is becoming much more interesting,” said Sam Hine, ’s fashion writer and the author of the menswear newsletter Show Notes. “There was much less trend-chasing and much more emphasis on fabric and craft and the exciting ways classic clothes can be combined and recombined through styling.” Hine cited LOEWE and Rick Owens as brands offering clothes that balanced the ceremony of a fashion show with the subtlety of well-made garms.Critic Matthieu Morge Zucconi, of France’s newspaper, agrees. “While I think ‘normal’ clothes belong on the runway, there is fine line between the great propositions we’ve seen at AURALEE, LEMAIRE, or Dries for example, refreshing classics in a desirable way and the unexciting and the banal,” Zucconi explained over text message. “Men’s fashion week needs the balance between wearable and creativity to keep the hype. This is what explains the critical acclaim of LOEWE among my peers for example, and this mix of brands is what makes PFW so strong at the moment—Paris has both the super easy wearable and the uncomparable creativity of people like Rick. That exists nowhere else.”

Hanging in that sweet spot between untamed creativity and dreaded banality were collections from Prada, Botter, Kiko Kostadinov, ERL, JW Anderson, Comme des Garçons, and Magliano; they turned the expected on its head. The blazer, menswear’s most meh item, got radical makeovers in the hands of Botter’s Rushemy Botter and Lisi Herrebrugh and CDG’s Rei Kawakubo. The former duo replaced tailored backs with upside-down trousers, and the latter sliced her guys’ jackets open over the breast, lining the slits with pearl buttons and adding sequin shirts underneath. Kostadinov and Anderson both created tension at the shoulder—relatable for those of us with tech neck—by adding draping and pin-tucking. “What I told Kiko after the show is, your next goal is to get this on Wall Street men and Midtown men,” said editor Blake Abbie. “People who do not wear fashion. This can just be another option for them to wear a different kind of outerwear or suit and still feel powerful.”Different options for expressing power is the story, always, at Prada, and the best idea Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons had was to fuse pants with belts, creating an ultra-low rise and ultra-kinky silhouette hinting that underneath every businessman is a freak. (Same vibe at Anderson’s show.)The collections that got my blood pumping most though were from ERL and Magliano. Both are young guys with enormous vibes who have a certain hometown rebelliousness. Eli Russell Linnetz has made Venice Beach into a dreamland of erotic Americana, imagining for this season a high school of preps, punks, and outcasts. His clothes are so deceptively fabulous—seems like any T-shirt or whatever jean, but in his universe, it’s magic. Ditto for Magliano, a chain-smoking Bolognese rebel who feels cut from the same spiritual cloth as Martine Rose. His shows have a big attitude, styled to a mischievous perfection, showcasing gorgeous Kiton suiting and silly little cat sweaters. (Men contain multitudes.)

And then there’s Martine Rose, so deftly setting a new agenda she didn’t even bother telling people she was having a show. Watching on Instagram, I felt ill with envy—of the people who made it to the event, of the models wearing such jaggy, evil, exotic, cool cobalt suits and swaggy, bold shouldered tops, of Martine herself, who possesses such mastery of our contemporary vernacular it makes other ways of seeing this world seem archaic. She knows the clothes don’t make the man—the man makes the man, and men should aspire to the level of panache exhibited by Chuck Rabb on Rose’s runway. (This season’s “Colin at Margiela walk!”)So, do wearable clothes matter? Should they be on the runway? After weeks of shows, the answer is the clothes will only get you halfway there. Dress in double-face cashmere. Be elegant. Be sophisticated and surefooted. But you must change your life.