The Italian glamour - Milan Fashion Week SS27
Milan Fashion Week has just wrapped up another season. As one of the legacy fashion weeks, Italian glamour never fails to impress. The architecture of the venues, the celebrities, the designs, and the beautiful people in town have turned the city into the biggest glamorous runway once again.
The understated elegance, craftsmanship, and heritage speak for themselves without screaming for attention or validation. It is a bigger stage, and all eyes are on Milan that week. Despite the star-studded performances and events, one cannot omit the legacy brands such as Fendi, Gucci, Max Mara, Prada, Etro, Roberto Cavalli, Emporio Armani, Ferragamo, Tod’s, Moschino and Dolce & Gabbana during Milan Fashion Week; they represent the essence of Italian fashion and women - sensual, elegant, not afraid to embrace their femininity, and sometimes a little wild.
Photo credit: Max Mara SS27
Photo credit: Max Mara SS27
For 75 years, Max Mara has represented the subtle elegance and luxury that every Italian woman loves. It’s like every Italian family owns a Max Mara coat at home, passed down through generations. For this season, the brand draws inspiration from the spirited, globe-trotting women of the 1930s, including Freya Stark, Amelia Earhart and Beryl Markham. Peeking into their sturdy travel paraphernalia, the collection discovers a world of style built for the modern woman.
Every piece is strictly engineered to handle the chaotic reality of contemporary life. The centrepiece is the reimagined safari jacket, rendered in textured linen and lustrous gabardine. The cargo vest, engineered to fit neatly over a jacket, provides maximum utility. Utilitarian overalls in organza and voluminous trenches with low-slung belts deliver a slouchy new smartness.
Absolutely gorgeous collection and, as always, highly wearable. This is a wardrobe for the woman who carries the resolute spirit of a 1930s explorer into everything she does, discovering the extraordinary in the everyday.
Photo credit: Prada SS27
Photo credit: Prada SS27
The interrogation of the skirt at Prada is also an interesting yet profound presentation - simplicity is not banal, nor is it simple. The collection saw co-creative directors Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons hone in on the skirt, with all 63 looks featuring an iteration of the garment, which has long been part of the Prada lexicon.
Each with a different cut, colour, pattern, texture and design. In other words, Prada just offered you different ways to style your skirt in one show. In their own words: “Engineered for freedom, the skirt is a Prada obsession. At once autonomous and interdependent of the clothes around, its definitive graphic silhouette, linear and modernist, offers the single fixed parameter for projection of ideas. The collection stays within the particular form language of this specific skirt, as an exercise of exploration inside strict parameters, a frame for ceaseless creation.”
Photo credit: Fendi SS27
Photo credit: Fendi SS27
Maria Grazia Chiuri, returning to Fendi once again in 2025 - where she first joined in 1989 and helped develop the Baguette bag - presented a sexy yet highly wearable collection for Fendi. In their own words, it’s a surrendering to that sense of freedom which, in the creation of the collection, becomes an interpretation of the desires of today’s bodies: strong and fragile at the same time, where masculine and feminine meet beyond wardrobe stereotypes.
In a mutual recognition where garments act as a second skin, porous to the emotions that shape our everyday lives. One can see her understanding of the brand and the Italian woman, yet she is not afraid to display the sensuality of the female body.
Photo credit: Prada SS27
Photo credit: Fendi SS27
For any fashion lover, a week of Milan Fashion Week is beautiful simply because of the sheer influx of inspiration. There are so many collections, ideas, references, silhouettes and interpretations coming through at once that it is almost impossible to take everything in. Seven days of fashion can be overwhelming, but that is also part of the joy of it - there is always something new to discover.
