This January marks the first menswear fashion week in Milan without a familiar constant in Giorgio Armani, after the designer died aged 91 in September. But the brand will still show on Monday, and there are other elder statesmen on the schedule in the shape of Ralph Lauren, 86, and Paul Smith, who will be 80 this year.
Paul Smith showed his collection on Saturday evening at the brand’s Italian HQ. Its playful nature was evident from the format as Smith himself compèred, with descriptions of the designs and inspirations over a microphone. The clothes demonstrated all the hallmarks that fans have come to love – bold prints, great suiting (this time oversized) and bright colours on sweaters and shirts.
Paul Smith at his Milan fashion week show. Photograph: Shutterstock
This is the second time Smith has shown his menswear collection in Milan. At a preview, he explained the compère format was a homage to the shows he saw as a young man at the ateliers of Coco Chanel and Yves Saint Laurent in the 1970s.
“I really wanted to do a salon show,” he said. “Because we’re still an independent company, and I still own it, it’s so personal in today’s corporate world, I think it’s really interesting.”
He said the collection had been partly inspired by collaborating with his new design director, Sam Cotton, and Cotton’s explorations of 5,000 designs found in the Paul Smith archive. “They come back and they go: ‘Look at this,’” he says. “I say: ‘I did that in 1982.’ ‘Yeah, but it’s bloody marvellous.’ And then we rework it.”
Items judged to be “bloody marvellous” shown on Saturday include a jacket first seen in a 1999 collection, and a rust-coloured grandad shirt that, Smith says, “I dyed on a gas cooker in a saucepan.”
Working with a different generation, but with items from the brand’s history, is perhaps a smart way to bring new customers to a label that began in 1970. But make no mistake – Smith is very much still the boss. “I get there at six every morning, I’m still completely involved. Nothing’s changed.”
Like many brands, Paul Smith has felt the effect of a post-pandemic luxury slowdown, with turnover falling 7% in 2024.
He warns that the latest news isn’t great either. “Our results this year won’t be very good at all,” he says. “But we’re here and we’re working it out, and we’re going to be fine.”
A model at Ralph Lauren’s Menswear Fall/Winter 2026 show at Milan fashion week. Photograph: Alena Zakirova/Getty Images
Ralph Lauren, meanwhile, is more than fine – it’s one of fashion’s current success stories, partly thanks to a boom in preppy, a style that the brand has practically patented over nearly 60 years. Sales were up 11% in the first quarter of 2025, and the phrase “Ralph Lauren Christmas” was trending online this festive season.
The show on Friday evening, which combined Polo with the more upmarket Purple label, felt like a celebration of all the style details that have fuelled the success of the label since it started in 1967. Although Lauren himself did not travel, his son David sat in the front row, along with Tom Hiddleston, Colman Domingo and Stranger Things’ Noah Schnapp, in a palazzo bought by Lauren in 1999.
The show went through clothes to suit the lifestyle of a wealthy wasp, an American archetype that is now synonymous with the brand. There were the fleeces, sweatshirts and rugby shirts of weekend wear, suits for the office and a night at the opera, and even the puffer jackets and boots of a skiing holiday.
As if to underline the point, the brand will be in Milan again in February – this time to dress Team USA for the Winter Olympics.