Putting together a trend report is a most daunting task. How to summarize months of work and countless looks—plus all the front-row chatter—into one list? After the spring 2025 menswear collections, the project was even more challenging. What does one make of a season of contradictions?
With the Olympics taking place in Paris this month, the men’s shows were immediately followed by couture, effectively turning Paris into a two-week fashion marathon. It was go, go, go all the time, a pace not helped by the closed metro stations, ludicrous traffic, and a perceptible undercurrent of anxiety. That talk in the front row? It was often about just how few designers are making money and the world crises amidst which fashion strains for relevance.
On the runways what we saw was push-pull between magnitude and intimacy. A year after his debut show at Louis Vuitton, Pharrell Williams took over the UNESCO Headquarters courtyard for a massive display about togetherness, while Kim Jones placed giant sculptures by the ceramicist Hylton Nel on his runway, where he sent out a sweater with the embroidered message “Dior for my real friends.” Rick Owens, ever the disruptor, staged a spectacle of epic proportions—we saw 10 looks, each repeated 20 times, on a total of 200 models—that was, at its core, a conversation about intimacy. Its vastness made one feel both small and present. “We’re trying to give people options to what are standard conventional ideas of aesthetics,” Owens said. “If we can blur the lines and make people consider other things, maybe that can lead to blurring the lines in consideration of how people treat each other.” My seatmates all cried.
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