Milan Fashion Week gets off to a trend-breaking start | Canada Voices

The opening days of Milan Fashion Week played out through streets and locales that were in mid-reinvention. The metropolis has been working overtime, hosting overlapping events within and beyond the city limits. As the runway shows began, the streets and trains filled with stylish showgoers as well as singer-songwriters passing through for the Sanremo Music Festival, Italy’s premier pop competition. Known as the antipasto to Eurovision, Sanremo is held in the nearby Ligurian resort town.

Meanwhile, it was announced that Milan will host the next Vogue World event in September – a travelling affair often described as the “Olympics of fashion.” All the while, the fanfare of the other Olympics – the Milan Cortina Winter Games – wound down and as the Paralympics now gears up.

These intersections have not eluded the National Chamber for Italian Fashion. It launched its first-ever, publicly-accessible Fashion Hub this week with an exhibit titled Future Threads: Italy’s New Wave. The presentation gathered emerging talent in Italy and beyond, from Florence’s sportswear-inspired Domenico Orefice to Vietnamese evening wear designer Phan Dang Hoang.

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The showcase also featured rising-star label Dennj, which does not buy new fabric for its collections and instead sources material from flea markets and donation drives. Hailing from the countryside of Emilia-Romagna, its designer, who goes by Dennj, created his brand after an encounter with a tailor who complained about scrapping mounds of beautiful material. The creative, who attended the Hub’s launch on Tuesday, said his approach isn’t simply the Italian way of “making do with what you have”; it’s a global callout for what he believes is fashion’s future: a circular economy.

“These clothes aren’t radical,” he said of the looks in his presentation, which combined bridal cues and influences from costume greats such as John Glaser of Bridgerton and Italian fashion legend Piero Tosi, who crafted looks for the 1963 film The Leopard. “It’s something that can bridge fashion into social and political progress, too, and it requires thinking that goes deeper than disposable trends,” Dennj said.

That idea carried into the first show on the calendar, Diesel. The set resembled a carnival warehouse, with piles of logo-stamped trinkets, novelty wares and the kinds of collectibles found at comic shops and flea markets. Oversized plastic animals – dinosaurs, whales, zebras – stood guard beside astronaut figures and Roman busts.

The all-over-the-map clothes – tailored suits, loose T-shirts, long dresses and short skirts – looked as if they could have been worn by New York club kids to an electroclash party in the early 2000s. It was a brief moment in the aughts when dance music, new wave and punk were braided together, and Diesel captured it with fake furs threaded with strands of colour and jackets made of what appeared to be insulation patches and mismatched wool thrifted from second-hand shops. The models’ makeup was tweaked at the last minute when New York drag artist CT Hedden dropped by backstage a few hours before the show and was asked for tips. “I gave them a quick drag tutorial, and I was surprised they went with some of it and really took it to heart,” he said of the looks featuring gold glitter and lime, pink and cerulean eye makeup.

While Denj and Diesel’s methods of subverting trends could be viewed as extreme, MM6 Maison Margiela’s collection seemed to fold two seemingly incongruous pastimes together: skiing and horseback riding.

A ranch-happy brown and cream cinched sweater with horse heads nestled at the belly turned front row heads as it galloped down the runway at Milan Central train station. So did the proceeding après-ski-inspired looks that paid tribute to the late French fashion designer André Courrèges, who was a pro at both modernism and sport. This mix of forward- and backward-looking was most evident in the array of blush, black and white go-go boots that came down the runway – a distinctly 2026 take on Courrèges footwear and eyewear that also included cyborg-style sunglasses and a smart use of logos on turtleneck sweaters and quarter-zips.

Taken together, the week’s events suggest that excess and restraint are no longer opposites, but parallel strategies for navigating fashion’s future.