Milan spoke with precision this season. Prada opened with silk skirts cut from menswear blocks, shaped to move cleanly without excess. Bottega Veneta refined its woven leather craft, a method rooted in techniques introduced by Vittorio and Laura Moltedo in the 1960s, each strand pulled and fixed by hand. Gucci, under Sabato De Sarno, advanced his study of structure, pieces built for endurance rather than effect. Across the city, designers worked with purpose, treating proportion as discipline and fabric as architecture. Milan did not shout for attention, it demonstrated control.
The System Beneath the Surface
Every show in Milan stands on a foundation laid long before the lights. In Lombardy and Veneto, factories in Cadore and Varese continue to produce the acetate that powers the global eyewear industry, a legacy dating back to the early twentieth century. Mazzucchelli 1849, still operating under the same family name, transforms cotton and wood pulp into cellulose sheets used by both heritage and independent houses. The same precision defines Biella’s wool mills, Parabiago’s shoemakers, and Florence’s tanneries. This network is Milan’s true engine, proof that consistency, not novelty, sustains authority.
Milan does not flatter. Its light cuts through the marble of the Duomo, begun in 1386, and strikes the glass towers that rose after the city’s postwar reconstruction in the 1950s. COY Eyewear studies how acetate behaves under this brightness, how pigments shift as light moves from stone to steel, how reflection changes perception. These are not aesthetic questions but technical ones, the kind that separate surface from mastery. Milan reveals what is built to last and what dissolves in exposure. To see it correctly is to understand that clarity is strength, and that precision is the only form of permanence.
This season’s shifts felt decisive: succession at Gucci, renewed direction at Bottega, and a closing Armani show that framed the city’s identity more than any spectacle could.
