Milan’s men’s collections are behind us, Paris’s are underway, and somewhere in the sweaty handover, it is worth asking what, precisely, we are looking at. The major houses have quietly rearranged the architecture. Tom Ford under Haider Ackermann, Valentino under Alessandro Michele, Versace under Dario Vitale (R.I.P.), and Dior now united under Jonathan Anderson: each presents men’s and women’s not as opposed seasons but as one continuous conversation, the border between them treated less as a rule than as a courtesy. That the categories have merged is, by now, the least interesting thing about them; it was never much of a war. The more pressing question, as the season turns over, is what men’s wear has become in itself.
To take its temperature, I spoke to some of the most expansive creative minds in the field—artists in their own right and theorists of dress, each at the height of their powers. Their diagnoses diverge in temperament but converge, against expectation, on optimism.
