Fashion

Spring 2027 Milan Fashion Week Highlights: Old Codes, New Tricks

BYLeena AlBakr

September 28, 2026

Milan Fashion Week has always been exciting, but fashion’s never-ending game of musical chairs has given the city a different kind of energy in recent years. New creative directors are finding their footing at houses with decades of history, inheriting established codes while figuring out what, exactly, to do with them.

Perhaps that is what Milan does best. Old and new don’t necessarily compete here. They coexist. Heritage becomes something to play with, challenge, and occasionally mess up a little. Because what is the point of a house code if you can’t push it somewhere new?

This Spring 2027 ready-to-wear season, that conversation played out differently at Prada, Jil Sander, Fendi, and Etro. One obsessed over a single garment. Another messed with perfection. A third quite literally made us look at ourselves and everyone around us. Etro, meanwhile, loosened everything up under the imaginary heat of the summer sun.

Prada: How Many Lives Can One Skirt Have?

Prada opened Milan Fashion Week and, naturally, decided one garment was enough to build an entire universe around. Titled “The Skirt,” the collection was exactly that: an exploration of the skirt and the seemingly endless lives it can have. It sounds restrictive in theory. On the runway, it was anything but.

Models walked across a transparent floor lit from beneath, its glowing grid extending into the audience seating. Against bare white walls, the set felt almost clinical, providing a precise frame for a collection that managed to find so much personality in one familiar garment.

The skirt has long been a Prada obsession. Back in 2006, Miuccia Prada compared it to a T-shirt, a staple that can become almost anything depending on how it is worn. That idea feels particularly Prada. Clothes here are rarely designed simply to look good. There is always a curiosity about what they do, how they function, and what happens when familiar objects are pushed somewhere slightly strange.

Which brings us to Velcro. Yes, Velcro was alive and well at Prada this season and, somehow, it was chic. Something normally hidden inside a garment, associated more with practicality than beauty, was deliberately exposed and placed against crystal embroidery, unexpected colors, and contrasting fabrics.

That tension ran throughout the collection. Ciré and Re-Nylon were manipulated into pleats, cotton masqueraded as leather and suede, crystals recreated the delicacy of lace, and innocent florals landed on synthetic surfaces. Even the familiar pleated skirt refused to behave, expanding beyond the body with excess fabric carried casually in the hand.

With the skirt remaining constant, everything happening around it became more noticeable. Asymmetrical eyewear, striking shoes and long, slim bags could completely change the mood. The bandeau tops had personalities of their own, too. My favorites came with bags attached, part top, part accessory and a rather brilliant answer to what to wear when you simply cannot be bothered to carry anything.

The brilliance was in seeing just how far one familiar garment could be stretched without losing its identity. Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons weren’t simply asking us to reconsider the skirt. They were asking how many possibilities might be hiding inside something we think we already know. Apparently, quite a few.

Jil Sander: Perfection Gets a Little Messy

Jil Sander was an early morning show, but the anticipation surrounding Simone Bellotti’s next move provided more than enough caffeine. The setting was unmistakably Jil Sander: stripped back, predominantly black and white, and almost severe in its simplicity. The seating brought everyone unusually close to the models, one another and, crucially, the clothes. There was nowhere for the collection to hide, which felt appropriate for a house so closely associated with precision.

Bellotti seemed less interested in perfection itself than in what happens when it starts to unravel. Tailoring established the rules before he slowly began messing with them. Lines shifted, folds twisted around the body, and layers contradicted one another. Silhouettes expanded in unexpected places before pulling close again elsewhere.

There was still discipline underneath everything, but instinct increasingly interrupted it. As the collection progressed, the clothes became less controlled. Knitwear crumpled. Hemlines crept upward. Pale dresses wrinkled, gathered, and ballooned away from the body into strange, airy volumes. What initially appeared rigid gradually began to soften.

Then came color. Against Jil Sander’s familiar muted palette, flashes of it felt almost intrusive. A Japanese landscape, an image usually associated with tranquility, was distorted until the scene became nearly abstract. It appeared less like a conventional print and more like an interruption.

That instability carried into the accessories. Pointed shoes stretched into exaggerated proportions, softer constructions disrupted otherwise strict lace-ups, and geometric bags bent and collapsed, occasionally revealing unexpected flashes of color.

By the end, the Jil Sander uniform was still recognizable, but something had shifted. Bellotti hadn’t abandoned the house’s rigor. He simply let it get a little messy. Turns out, perfection is much more interesting when you let it misbehave.

Fendi: Mirror, Mirror

At Fendi, you couldn’t really look at the collection without also looking at everyone else. The runway was built around a mirrored structure inspired by Italian artist Luciano Fabro’s Cubo di specchi. As models moved through the space, their reflections multiplied across the mirrors while the audience became part of the view. The mirror stopped being something used solely for looking at yourself and became a way of watching everyone else, too.

The collection carried a similar sense of duality. There was softness, but a harder, more decadent attitude kept cutting through it. Black dresses revealed flashes of skin through metal-ringed cutouts, while beads, fur, and lace brought texture and movement. Lingerie-inspired pieces appeared alongside heavier outerwear, and relaxed striped shirting gave the collection an undone sensuality. The glamour came slightly roughed up around the edges.

And then, of course, there were the Baguettes. For me, one of the most exciting parts of Maria Grazia Chiuri’s Fendi is watching familiar Baguette shapes and proportions return, shift and evolve. This season offered yet another reason to revisit the house icon, further confirming that there is apparently no maximum number of Fendi Baguettes one person can reasonably need.

Do we need another one? Probably not. Will that stop us? Absolutely not. Prepare your wallets.

Etro: Chasing the Sun

There is something particularly interesting about watching a house move through a period led by its design team. Without one creative director’s name dominating the conversation, your attention naturally returns to the house itself. What stays? What changes? And which codes are worth carrying forward? At Etro, the answer this season was to lighten everything up.

The house’s familiar bohemian language remained, but it felt sun-bleached and slightly undone. Paisleys faded toward abstraction, prints softened and silhouettes moved with an easy weightlessness. Dresses floated around the body, transparencies and fringe created movement, and precious pieces were unexpectedly layered with windbreakers, suede, and denim.

Color moved almost like the course of a summer day, beginning with barely there nudes before warming into yellows and oranges, cooling into blues and greens, then eventually settling into deeper burgundy, brown and black.

The design team didn’t need to reinvent Etro to move it forward. Everything recognizable about the house was still there. It simply looked like it had spent the entire day in the sun and come back a little lighter.

Spring 2027 Milan Fashion Week Highlights: Old Codes, New Tricks

Prada: How Many Lives Can One Skirt Have?

Jil Sander: Perfection Gets a Little Messy

Fendi: Mirror, Mirror

Etro: Chasing the Sun

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