Reporting From the Void: Men’s Fashion Week Has a Freaky Fall 2023 Season

No shirts, lots of skirts, and great new shapes are the story from the menswear Fall/Winter 2023 runway shows.

Fashion Week can be a black hole. At its worst, middling runway shows with small, uninteresting theses suck you in with no possibility of escape. Yuck! But at its best, fashion week can force a spaghettification of the mind, stretching it out to make room for new ideas, new silhouettes, and new ways of thinking about your clothes—and yourself.

After racing through the Fall/Winter 2023 menswear season that sprawled across Florence, Milan, and Paris, I have a strong case of Fashion Black Hole Syndrome. The things that were bad were abjectly terrible, but the things that were great were outstanding in totally new ways. Rather than focus on the spectacle of fashion—a premise established during the perfect storm of the 2010s fashion Olympics, when luxury brand creative directors competed for the most celebrities in the front row, the most expensive sets, and the most wacky clothing memes—this season focused on clothes. Irony, stupidity, and virality felt out of place this year, and the shows that chased that high fell flatter than ever.Simple, obvious, humble, gorgeous clothes were everywhere, from Martine Rose’s wham-bam Italian debut at Pitti Uomo in Florence to Wales Bonner’s potent elegance in Paris. Even the ear-pinching screams from K-pop ENHYPEN fans outside the Prada show in Milan couldn’t drown out Raf Simons and Miuccia Prada’s message of sensual normalcy, communicated via pillowy suede trenches and severe, butter-yellow cardigans. Even Rick Owens, who has given us smoke, fire, fog, and water, found a new way to provoke tension through tailoring, looking to the erotic push-pull of Victorian silhouettes.Great clothes can make your back straighter, your walk swaggier, your spirit a little lighter. The options for Fall/Winter 2023 are broad, from the wafty tailoring of Lemaire to the apocalyptic black workwear at Junya Watanabe to the sporty little gorpshorts at Sacai. And then there is JW Anderson, peerless in his Big Idea Agenda, who threw the nonsense out the window and offered up nothing but singular pieces, from frog-shaped mules to stunning shearling coats.In that sense, the biggest trend of Fall/Winter 2023 menswear is to cultivate your own style. Find the clothes that meet you where you are and love them. Dress bravely and with intention. Kylie Jenner dressed as an endangered species won’t be there when you take your fit pic—it's just you, by your freaky lonesome. But the way Kiko Kostadinov’s new jodhpurs bulk up around the throat of his tall new boots in magenta? That might just change your life.

“The sweater is the sweater. The trouser is the trouser. The jacket is the jacket. There’s no kind of over explanation in the look,” said Jonathan Anderson after his Fall/Winter 2023 menswear show. Anderson, alongside Lemaire, Rick Owens, and Prada, focused on obvious, beautifully made clothes. Silhouette. Shape. Fabrication. Execution. No stunts, just sartorialism of the most imaginative kind.

Showing sternum is going to be big this fall. The deep V-necks at Gucci, the singlets at DSquared2, and the total lack of shirts at all at Ludovic de Saint Sernin, Prada, Rick Owens, and JW Anderson set the “no shirt, no problem” agenda.

Kiko Kostadinov and Rei Kawakubo agree: Tailoring is all about freaking it. Kostadinov took a naive approach to the work of female designers like Anne-Marie Beretta and his own peers Laura and Deanna Fanning, leaving the sexy dude tailoring of Armani and Versace in the past and opting for a fantastic array of shrunken jackets, blouson tunics, and dramatic trench coats. At Comme des Garçons, Kawakubo cut away squiggles and bulked up cropped jackets to thrilling ends, while her stablemate Watanabe applied prepper ideologies to his all-black collection of blazers and cargo pants. It was hard not to be moved by Yohji Yamamoto’s long, poignant collection of suits that concluded with a trio of black looks with white smudges of fabric splotched across them. Unlike his opening looks, these felt poetically crude. “I wanted to do something unprofessional,” he told Vogue. Isn’t that fun, unprofessional suits?! Even Givenchy’s Matthew Williams, who can hew pretty normie, offered raw-edged, playful tailoring. Hed Mayner also developed a shrunken New Look shape for guys that will appeal to more experimental dressers.

Several years ago, skirts on the men’s runways were a novelty meant to prompt conversations about gender. Now, they are the norm, with Charles Jeffrey Loverboy, Dior Men, Etro, Givenchy, Hed Mayner, Rick Owens, Kiko Kostadinov, Kenzo, Sacai, and more showing midis and maxis for men. Amen.

Kiss your sneakers goodbye. The shoes of the season are JW Anderson’s frog mules. Or are they Lemaire’s ballet slippers for boys? Or Rick Owens’s legendary thigh-high boots? Imaginative, funny footwear spiced up the catwalks, giving Grailed addicts something to obsess over. Beware the sleeper hit: Marine Serre’s wrestling boots.

It’s ladies night at men’s Fashion Week! The most talked-about and enjoyable shows were designed by women: Martine Rose at Pitti Uomo, and Wales Bonner, Bode, and Marine Serre in Paris. The women of menswear have dual-gendered runway collections, include models of all ages and sizes, and have found a way to cut their own path in the cluttered fashion world. Their names might be the most talked about when it comes to big creative director roles, but each of these designers mines her own history and heritage to make clothes that feel refreshing, clever, and essential for now. They would be smart to not get involved in the foibles of these creative director dudes trying to one-up themselves with collabs and hype.