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Can You Find Your Personal Style at a Fashion Show?

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2 months ago

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Can You Find Your Personal Style at a Fashion Show?

We’re living in a personal style economy. What would have been called taste in the decades preceding the internet has been rebranded as a mission to find oneself through what one buys with a clear, obvious end: Once you have found your personal style, you will finally, blissfully, wholly be you. There are essays and Substacks and TikTok series about finding personal style, maintaining personal style, and what happens when everyone else’s personal style is just like yours. (Maybe not so personal after all?)

The fixation with unique taste—and the idea that it is a deciding factor in one’s identity—has finally trickled up to the runways. In Milan, often a city that issues big fashion diktats from key heritage brands, the story across four days of runway shows has been less about one broadstroke seasonal trend and more about finding a special bit of eclecticism that epitomizes a shopper’s own vibe.

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A close-up of a Prada look

No one did it better than Prada. In 49 looks, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons cruised through different archetypes of style, transforming known fashion tropes into outfits that are stranger, weirder, and more sinister than what you might find on your For You Page. Here’s a simple sundress—a hotly debated item on TikTok this summer—redone in a filmy yellow floral and suspended from wire to give it a perennially windswept look. A navy wool marinière knit has its stripes peeling off, worn with a yeehaw cowgirl skirt. Prim car coats are paired with shrugged-on sneaker mules, and a sporty orange anorak is thrown over a dress of a hundred plumes.

prada runway springsummer 2025 milan fashion week

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Prada feathers!

The hodge-podge of the clashing aesthetics didn’t come off as chaotic—if anything it looked more like the throngs of people who turned up to party at the Fondazione Prada after the show, a vintage stiletto here, a baggy cargo pant there, a glitzy frock dressed down with an oversized jacket, all swaying and grooving to Richie Hawtin and Clara 3000.

After the show, Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons spoke about reflecting both the sameness and the randomness of the algorithms that rule our lives. “Humanity can be defined by its unpredictability,” the show notes read, which is a polite way of saying the contemporary world is no stranger to a daily onslaught of fresh hells. But Prada found beauty in uncertainty, bravely putting out a collection that encourages breaking the fashion rules. “We wanted to show there are many ways of being Prada,” Mrs. Prada said post-show. It’s a powerful message from such a powerful brand, a staunch declaration that being yourself and embracing uniqueness is more important than buying into a brand identity. But it also says that if you “be yourself” you are also “being Prada”—a genius motto for an iconoclastic label.

Over at Marni, Francesco Risso sent out a cast of iconoclasts on his runway too. With Divine eyebrows and topsy-turvy 1950s silhouettes, the Marni crew had a heightened campy spirit. Ultra-slim capri pants were worn with hiked-up shrunken blazers in eerie shades of mint and ivory. Oversize rose prints adorned zoot suits and swing dresses. A finale of retro prom-like dresses in three-dimensional flowers left people gasping at the craftsmanship—especially impressive once you learned the entire collection was made from a single material: cotton.

Risso’s dexterous patternmaking allows him to do things with such a humble fabric that other designers could only dream of, but it was not only the awesomeness of the clothes but the awesomeness of the attitude that brought the Marni show to life. Each model, set down their own path between aisles of chairs, was the star of their show in their voluptuous and showstopping outfit—and if there was ever a case to be made for living every day like the protagonist of your own movie, this was it.

Elsewhere in Milan, that spirit of main character energy bubbled up at Versace, Fendi, Jil Sander, Gucci, Moschino, and more. Donatella Versace, the woman who basically invented the contemporary bombshell, instead embraced quirkiness and mish-mash dressing at her poetic show, pairing colored tights with ditsy ’90s floral prints.

And Kim Jones revived elegant 1930s drop-waist dresses at Fendi, making them feel fresh with life. The kinds of things young women dream of finding at their local vintage store appeared on the runways in sheer, slinky black.

Luke and Lucie Meier added some moodiness to their Jil Sander vision, beading rugby jerseys and cutting suits in shimmering iridescent wools. Sabato de Sarno’s Gucci girls sped through different moods from tomboyish workwear suits to spritely bubble skirts to sexy singlet tanks worn with slouchy jeans. The Moschino character, under Adrian Appiolaza’s vision, is similarly a magpie of styles: A woman embracing all the characteristics that make her herself, from her tight white tubino dress to her bed sheet wrapped around her like a toga.

In his collection, Appiolaza might have made the most prescient declaration of style over fashion. With the help of stylist Alasdair McKimm, he enlisted Terry Jones, the co-founder of i-D magazine, to design prints for suits and separates that read “What’s Up!” in Jones’s signature font. Amidst the sameness of fashion trends that are sweeping up other runways, Jones’s rebellious prints hammered home the point of the Milanese shows so far: You do you. Dress like yourself, and use these catwalks as a guide.

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