This week marks the arrival of Milan Fashion Week Men’s A/W 2024, promising a blueprint for how men will dress in the season ahead – from the richly sartorial to the boldly experimental. On the first day, all eyes were on Sabato De Sarno – the Gucci creative director showed his debut menswear collection for Gucci, infused with an easy sensuality – and Stone Island, the cult Italian label holding its own first runway show, despite being founded in 1982. 

Elsewhere, JW Anderson will return to Milan to show a menswear collection no doubt punctuated with the unexpected – on Instagram he has teased budgie-shaped clutch bags – while Prada will attempt to follow its viral slime-drenched runway with another equally transporting show set. Shows and collections from Dolce & Gabbana, Emporio Armani and Giorgio Armani, Tod’s, MSGM and Zegna (among others), will round out the schedule, the latter closing the week on January 15, 2024.

Here, in our ongoing round-up, we review the very best of Milan Fashion Week Men’s A/W 2024 – as it happens. 

The best of Milan Fashion Week A/W 2024, as it happens

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Stone Island

(Image credit: Courtesy of Stone Island)

Stone Island’s first runway show was not a runway show at all; rather, as attendees streamed into the vast industrial space, models were already present, clamped in rows onto an enormous scaffolding structure. The effect reminded of their distinct advertising campaigns – whereby models stand square to the camera against a stark white background – though here, they were framed by the scaffold’s metal jousts and glimpsed through a veil of dry ice. 

The show itself, with a suitably seat-vibrating techno soundtrack (the Italian outerwear brand has long been adopted by subcultures, from the Milanese Paninari to British ravers), comprised a light show of sorts, whereby glitching, flashing lights illuminated the rows of models, who wore the brand’s A/W 2024 collection. The grand finale was a black curtain which dropped from the ceiling to conceal the models, projected with Stone Island’s compass logo – one of street fashion’s most enduring symbols.

If the curtain went down prematurely – as was revealed after the show – it did little to dampen the spectacle, which captured the label’s underground spirit, revealing a gamut of techy, streetwear-infused pieces (notably, a series of jackets and joggers with a liquidy, almost holographic shine), while appealing to a new market the brand hopes to mine through social media impressions from the evening. Indeed, earlier in the day, Stone Island revealed an S/S 2024 campaign featuring a well-known roster of faces, from actor Jason Statham and choreographer Wayne McGregor, to musician Dave and rising British tennis player Henry Searle. As I drove through Milan to the show, it was already on bus stops and billboards. 

Gucci

(Image credit: Photography by Daniele Venturelli/Getty Images for Gucci)

Sabato De Sarno continued to hone his vision for Gucci with his debut menswear collection for the house, held in a former factory space on the northern outskirts of Milan. It was a collection infused with the easy, insouciant sensuality which defined his first womenswear collection shown this past September. There, he looked towards the multiplicity of the street for a collection which straddled pragmatism and glamour; pieces ran from luxurious riffs on hoodies, tank tops and denim to crystal babydoll dresses and outerwear adorned with trails of glimmering tassels. 

Here, languid tailoring, floor-skimming overcoats and Gucci-adorned bomber jackets (as well as a return of the grey hoodie), met elongated silk ties, flourishes of crystal adornment, and new versions of the chunky Marina Chain necklace, which had originally appeared in the womenswear collection. De Sarno called it ’a mirroring effect’: from the casting (entirely new faces), to the press notes (a declaration that the collection was an attempt to capture ’the joy of life’), and the soundtrack (Mark Ronson‘s remix of Ancora Ancora Ancora by Mina), he noted a desire to replicate ‘the emotions that were felt, this time through the perspective of menswear’.

It asserted his cohesive, wide-ranging vision for the house, one which will no doubt prove particularly seductive to shoppers. But the collection also heralds a break from the unrestrained maximalism of his forebear Alessandro Michele, seeing De Sarno – despite the sometimes heavy weight of expectation – confidently strip back the extraneous towards a more discreet elegance, nonetheless infused with the moments of ’joy, passion and humanity’ that the designer has put forth as the pillars for his renovation of the Italian powerhouse.