Men’s fashion week has long been considered the quieter, less showy sibling of the long-standing women’s event. While Pitti Uomo dates back to 1972, it was only in 2012 that London hosted its first men’s fashion week, and 2015 for New York, making it a much newer proposition in comparison to London Fashion Week’s 40-year history. In recent years, though, we’ve witnessed a shift. Recognising consumers’ more holistic attitude to men’s and women’s clothing, many designers have dispensed with hard-line categories and incorporated a more fluid approach, featuring womenswear in men’s shows and vice versa.
Not only that, but the menswear shows are being increasingly lauded for their agenda-setting influence on wider industry trends, with menswear shows from Prada, Gucci and Louis Vuitton being just as closely scrutinised by fashion insiders as the women’s collections. On a personal level, as someone who sometimes finds themselves lost in the intricate world of womenswear design, I savour the simplicity of menswear: the sturdy knits, the effortless tailoring, the throw-on-and-go shoes.
Case in point: Prada’s autumn-winter 2025 show was a conveyor belt of wearable yet stylish ensembles that I would happily pluck off the runway and wear right now. But there was one item in particular that piqued my interest, and that was a slim-fit pants.
One of the consistent threads within this “curated chaos” (as Vogue Runway’s Luke Leitch puts it) of a collection, the calf-clinging silhouette suggested a clean break from the super-oversized styles that have proliferated in recent years and been championed by the likes of Gucci, Bottega Veneta and Balenciaga. Not quite a cigarette, not quite a straight-leg, the Prada pants’ appeal lies in its subtle tapering, which creates the merest whisper of a “balloon” fit – something that was also, incidentally, seen in Altuzarra’s autumn-winter 2024 collection.
