Menswear has just received its biannual update — and we have the Spring Summer 2025 Fashion Weeks to thank for that. Men’s Folio rounds up what’s hot for the SS25 season to come.
For the SS25 season, the fashion capitals of Milan and Paris saw to it that revamps came in micro-doses. As per the summer mandate, the same-old formula of shorts, lightweight knits and flowy fabrics continued on for yet another season. Gucci kept to the brief with brief-length shorts, ZEGNA did it with its Oasi Lino ideology and Dior Men put its potter’s spin on it with hybridized ceramic capes. But the continuation of FW24’s agenda was also obvious. Tonal get-ups were rampant, ballet flats rife, and the need to personalise everything and anything with a doctor’s dose of charms and accoutrements returned once more to the runway. Big this season too, were the bags. Louis Vuitton (re)introduced archive silhouettes in declaration of its bigger-is-better ethos, whilst Tod’s, Berluti and Dolce&Gabbana all had one extra, extra-large baggage offering in one form or another for the season.
Below, see all the menswear trends from the SS25 runways to keep an eye for in time to come.
The Slouch
Cave into the latest baggage craze of the slouch. Bad bag posture has now been officially christened as sleek, as seen throughout Louis Vuitton, Tod’s and Gucci’s new season offerings. Luxury has wholly embraced that concave, convex, or simply ballooning silhouette for men’s baggage — across all iterations of top-handles, crossbodies and even mini-purses.
Dance, Dance!
There’s nothing quite like a trust pair of ballet flats to declare summer’s arrival. For SS25, fashion is demanding one to show off the tops of their feet in the most stylistic way possible — via a resurgence of last year’s ever-enduring Balletcore trend. From the usual flat-footwear proponents like Lemaire and Wales Bonner to larger luxury houses like Gucci and Fendi, balletcore is set to live on in 2025 — one low-profile leather slipper at a time.
Tone On Tone, On Tone
It’s the same, only different! SS25 presented a myriad of co-ords: each set colour-coded with intentional tonal similarities in mind. It doesn’t matter how many (or little) layers one’s opting for come summertime — houses like ZEGNA, Louis Vuitton, Hermès, Homme Plisse Issey Miyake and Berluti are all pledging allegiance with monochromaticism for the season.
Personality, Commodified
In case you missed it, bag charms are taking over the fashion-sphere, one luxury house at a time. We saw it first with Louis Vuitton and Fendi’s speaker clip-ons, and then again with the Balenciaga’s extravagantly-adorned Rodeo bag. This season, Dior Men chose to let loose with a series of ceramic and woven accoutrements for its bag line, while Acne Studios and Doublet piled it on with keyrings galore.
To Scale
Bigger, bigger, bigger… If FW24 had big bags, SS25 has upped the ante, going the route of bigger is better. Dolce&Gabbana, ZEGNA and Tod’s all showed that size does matter with mammoth-scale handcarry options — each one in a larger format than before.
Cinch It!
We should have known from the moment Sabato de Sarno declared the revival of the 2014-infamous Gucci belt at his FW24 menswear debut. Fashion has decided that the hero accessory for the season would be none other than the straightforward leather loop. Now a bigger point of interest than ever before, belts materialised as the eye-catcher detail of the season — appearing at Prada as trouser-printed trompe l’oeil experiments, at Moschino as looping closures for new man-purses, and at Dolce&Gabbana as a drape-y elongation of the legs.
Short Shorts
Summers are warming up year on year — which is the perfect excuse for hemlines to be rising higher each season. From the Paul Mescal shorter-than-short shorts from Gucci to Martine Rose’s play on briefs and JW Anderson’s tight bikers, SS25 is the season to show some thigh.
Once you are done with this story, click here to catch up with our June/July 2024 issue.