Paris Fashion Week Men’s A/W 2025 highlights: Hermès to Lanvin

Paris Fashion Week Men’s marked the final stop on menswear’s A/W 2025 month-long tour, a blockbuster finale comprising shows from some of fashion’s biggest names – among them Dior and Louis Vuitton, the latter opening proceedings on Tuesday evening with Pharrell Williams’ latest collection for the house. Celebrating a ‘friendship for life’ with streetwear legend Nigo, he teamed up with the Kenzo creative director on a co-designed collection shown among a series of vitrines containing objects from their personal archives (a nod to Nigo’s legendary fashion collection, which numbers over 10,000 pieces).

Elsewhere, Rick Owens paid ode to Concordia – the industrial Italian town where he has created his garments for over two decades – and Issey Miyake’s IM Men line held its debut runway show (it replaces the Homme Plissé Issey Miyake presentation the Japanese label usually shows in Paris). And, while Loewe might be sitting this season out, a handful of new arrivals on the schedule filled the gaps: notably, Willy Chavarria shifted from New York to Paris with a show at the American Cathedral, and Jacquemus hosted a dedicated menswear show (complete with haute couture-inspired looks for women). British designer Peter Copping’s anticipated debut at Lanvin closed the week on the evening of 26 January (he showed his first men’s and womenswear collections together).

Here, Wallpaper* fashion features editor Jack Moss unpacks the highlights from Milan Fashion Week Men’s A/W 2025.

Paris Fashion Week Men’s A/W 2025: the best of

Lanvin

British designer Peter Copping looked towards the figure of Jeanne Lanvin herself for his anticipated debut at the Parisian house (after roles at Louis Vuitton, Oscar de la Renta and Balenciaga, it was fair to say expectations were high). ‘This collection is deeply personal – an homage to Jeanne Lanvin’s world and her intimate sense of style,’ he said of the collection, which was fittingly titled ‘À la maison’ and presented men’s and womenswear together. ‘I sought to project the essence of her wardrobe today while imagining it on a cast of modern characters.’

Indeed, there was a distinctly 1920s inflection to Copping’s vision in robe de style silhouettes (a Lanvin signature), darkly glamourous adornments (which took their cues from Art Deco), and roomy, mannish overcoats. Other dresses were constructed from clashing panels of fabric, swathes of sequins, or the molten golden material which closed the show, while the jumpsuit became another proposition for formalwear. But while there was certainly something appealing about the collection’s opulence and eclecticism – there were a multitude of propositions on show – at times you wished Copping would hover a little longer over an idea and really drill into a silhouette.

Menswear, for now, felt a little less fleshed out, largely comprising overcoats worn over high-neck tops and worn with formal trousers ribbed at the ankle, though a 3D-knit cardigan gave a glimpse of something more intriguing. For now, it was a robust start from Copping, who has plenty of good will on his side (his runway bow took place to rousing applause). We look forward to seeing his vision for Lanvin – a house which has been sorely missed from the schedule – evolve.

Wooyoungmi

A re-consideration of eveningwear has run through the menswear season, with designers embracing (or indeed disrupting) formal tailoring in pursuit of a contemporary elegance (there have been plays at Dior, Prada, Hermès, Willy Chavarria and Acne Studios, albeit in radically different ways). At Wooyoungmi – in a kind of back-to-front manner – eveningwear looks came at the start of a show which explored the idea of sartorialism amid the opulent surroundings of 51 Rue de l’Université, one of Karl Lagerfeld’s former Paris residences. Double-breasted and narrowing to a sculpted waistline, Madame Woo’s pin-sharp proposition for the suit came adorned with 3D-appliqué flowers, a silhouette which continued into an elongated leather overcoat and a play on ther herringbone sports jacket, while similar 3D floral motifs bloomed from the neck of a striped shirt, or emerged from the neckline of a satin military jacket for women (the collection was co-ed). The designer said she had been thinking about ‘ideas of proper dressing’, seeing the remaining collection play on a series of menswear archetypes – from the shearling-collar crombie coat to parkas and crew-neck sweaters – reimagined in neat, youthful proportions. Meanwhile an element of play (Madame Woo has always derived inspiration from the eclectic street style of her native South Korea), came in quilted florals, zip-away trousers and enormous mittens which hung from the sleeves of jackets.

Sacai

Chitose Abe set her A/W 2025 menswear collection in the curving upper gallery of Palais de Tokyo, its vast walls plastered with floor-to-ceiling photographs of rolling desert dunes, to surreal effect. It provided the backdrop for a collection she described as an exploration of the ‘notion of wilderness… ideas of living in nature, untamed and unrestricted by convention’. The starting point was Maurice Sendak’s 1963 children’s book Where the Wild Things Are, with the author’s illustrations appearing on intarsia-knit sweaters or scrawled across T-shirts. In the book, protagonist Max imagines escaping to a land of magical beasts; here, Abe sought to evoke a similarly fantastical realm, with colourful flourishes of faux fur (a continuing trend) sprouting from the hems of a skirt or the sleeve of a blazer, while a collaboration with Ugg saw huge shaggy folds enveloping their signature footwear (a Carharrt collaboration also featured). The rest was a gloriously eclectic mish-mash which hopped between place and time – from skiwear and hiking apparel to the classic trench and tuxedo – de- and reconstructed in Abe’s signature hybrid style.

Hermès

As artistic director of the Hermès men's universe, Véronique Nichanian has proved astute at creating the type of garments you view on the runway and want to wear straight out the door. This was especially true of her A/W 2025 collection, shown at Paris’ Palais d’Iéna on Sunday afternoon, where on a particular grey and drizzly day she presented a collection of envelopment and comfort: ‘to enter a garment as you would a house, to dress with the feeling of being welcomed,’ she described via the accompanying notes. This meant a collection of cold-weather layers ‘to brave the bite of winter’, a sublime textural assemblage of alpaca, cashmere flannel, velvet, bouclé, shearling and mohair across chunky-knit sweaters with poncho hoods, coats with swaddling blanket linings, and glossy-finish parkas which looked particularly primed for the day’s conditions. Though there was a suggestion of formality, too, in a beautiful pair of velvet suits which were revealed in the collection’s closing looks – albeit in Nichanian’s insouciant style, with sharp notched lapels and wide-cut trousers recalling the louche glamour of the 1970s.

Kiko Kostadinov

The consensus after Kiko Kostadinov’s latest menswear show was that this was his best collection in some seasons, a brilliant melange of elements which despite their intrinsic strangeness nonetheless felt rooted in the reality of an everyday wardrobe (the Bulgaria-born, London-based designer is known for his off-kilter silhouettes, unexpected colour combinations and sheen of futurism, which has run through his oeuvre so far). Presented on a runway littered with dried leaves and torn-up shards of paper, Kostadinov had looked towards the work of Hungarian director Béla Tarr this season, whose haunting films often unfold in stark, isolated environments. As such, Kostadinov described the collection as ‘textured and rugged… defined by a feeling of rawness and organic assemblage,’ and there was a certain toughness to military-style jackets, funnel-neck overcoats and chunky leather boots. Though wrapped, poncho-like knits spoke to a softer feeling of envelopment, while an as-ever astute use of colour and textural motifs – much of the latter drawn from the designer’s native Bulgaria and its historic handcraft – suggested a figure finding beauty even in the extreme. ‘Tarr’s characters exist in worlds where the surroundings – the weather, objects, spaces – are constantly seeping in, accumulating, installing themselves within an individual’s very being and the fabric of their clothes,’ said Kostadinov via the collection notes.

Comme des Garçons Homme Plus

Despite the churn of world news which has backdropped this edition of Men’s Fashion Week, surprisingly few designers have engaged a political stance this season. At Comme des Garçons Homme Plus, Rei Kawakubo would prove an exception. In surprisingly direct style – typically, her brief, one-sentence collection notes are more esoteric, and open to interpretation – she titled her A/W 2025 menswear collection ‘To Hell With War’. Set to a melancholic trio of songs by Nina Simone – Lilac Wine, Four Women and Wild is the Wind – she described it as a ‘breaking down [of] army symbols such as uniform shapes, colour, camouflage, patterns [and] helmets’. As such, helmets sprouted with flowers or were wrapped in opulent, turban-like satin wraps; military jackets were stretched into strange proportions, or deconstructed and torn apart; while heavy army boots had their toes cut and turned upwards. Other military attire was boldly recoloured into childlike hues. It felt tentatively hopeful: an army of rebels breaking away from stricture and convention, towards utopia. Or did the flowers represent a memorial? As ever, Kawakubo gave no more explanation.

Dior

In his over-half-decade as artistic director of Dior’s menswear line, British designer Kim Jones has proved adept at translating the house’s venerable archive into clothing for the present day – or, in his words, for ‘now’. This can be complex: Christian Dior worked only in womenswear, and in the medium of haute couture, though Jones has found a throughline in the way the couturier often drew from men’s tailoring and its fabrics (since early in his tenure, he has created versions of the nipped-waist Bar Jacket in new proportions for men). For his latest show, which was presented on a stark white staircase in a specially constructed showspace in the grounds of Paris’ École Militaire, Jones said he wanted to get back to the ‘quintessence’ of Dior, drawing inspiration from the ‘graphic and angular’ lines of the house’s Ligne H collection, presented in the mid-1950s.

It made for a show of renewed clarity from the designer, which shifted between periods and silhouettes – from the opulent abundance of an opera coat to the sharp, carved line of the tailoring – in what he described as ‘an encounter of extravagance and simplicity, of yesterday and today’. Looks from his second dedicated couture collection for men were interspersed throughout (including some truly extraordinary embroidered pieces), while the bow became a motif, hanging from the back or sleeve of a jacket, and referenced in the twisting knots of fabric on the shoes. One inspiration was the figure of ‘ladies man’ Casanova in the shifts between masculine and feminine, and the air of 18th-century opulence (he was also conjured in the blindfold-like silk scarves which wrapped around models' faces).

‘There is a sense of fashion history, particularly the history of menswear, running through this collection – the shift from something quite ornate and extravagant in the 18th century to something more linear and utilitarian in the 19th, with the beginnings of modern menswear,’ said Jones, who later that evening would receive the French Legion of Honour, the country’s highest civilian decoration (the equivalent to a British knighthood). ‘Yet, while a lot refers to the history of fashion, this is not historical fashion. Ultimately, in this collection, we wanted to say something about now.’

Junya Watanabe MAN

Junya Watanabe MAN has long taken cues from traditional workwear, with intriguing interpretations of the chore jacket, carpenter pant, and denim jeans among the Japanese designer’s signatures. For his latest show, he continued an exploration of archetypes with a more rugged iteration of the Junya Watanabe man, collaborating with historic Seattle-based outdoor brand, Filson, which was founded in 1897. Noting a desire for ‘something real’, the collection – which centred around reinterpretations of Filson’s Mackinaw Cruiser jacket – was presented on a cast of burly, bearded men, with plaid shirts, waxed jackets, patchworked jeans and trucker hats all riffed on in the down-to-earth collection. And, while there was certainly a masculine directness to the show’s vision – which also featured collaborations with Levi’s and New Balance – elements of strangeness, like the incongruous office shirts and ties which sat beneath the rugged outer layers, were true to Watanabe’s avant-garde roots.

Rick Owens

There was a sense of optimism to Rick Owens’ latest outing, held in one of Palais de Tokyo’s vast gallery wings that is currently between installations (as such, the raw concrete and building detritus provided a suitable backdrop for Owens’ brutalist approach). Soundtracked by David Bowie’s ‘Heroes’ – the musician’s soaring tale of lovers across the Berlin Wall, here played in various languages – there was an uplifting energy to the collection, which was an ode of sorts to Concordia, an industrial town in Italy where Owens has produced his collections for the past two decades. From staying in ‘serial killer hotels’ in those early years to sleeping on couches in his office, and later purchasing an apartment in the town, the designer said he was thinking about how Concordia has come to represent something of a creative monastery.

‘Me and my team all travel from our respective glittering cities to live here in a kind of studious isolation, almost bleakness,’ he said. ‘This cloistered life seems to be what it takes to be able to focus on reaching for something weird and wonderful.’ This season, that meant a series of extraordinary boots constructed from slices of laser-cut leather reminiscent of feathers or scales (a technique undertaken in collaboration with Victor Clavelly and appearing also on skirts), ‘megacrust’ jeans (bronze foil and wax layered onto denim) and sculptural garments made from millefeuille layers of rubber. ‘I want to depend on less things but make them as supernatural as possible,’ he concluded.

IM Men

The trio of designers behind Issey Miyake’s IM Men, which made its debut in Paris this season, said their latest collection began with a look backwards to ‘Fly with Issey Miyake’, a seminal show that the Japanese house’s namesake held in Tokyo and Kyoto in 1977. For Sen Kawahara, Yuki Itakura and Nobutaka Kobayashi – who helped found the offshoot in 2021 alongside the late Issey Miyake himself – the show is ‘legendary’, capturing the designer’s longtime fabric-first philosophy of ‘a piece of cloth’ with billowing, parachute-like silhouettes. As such, for A/W 2025, the designers thought about a piece of material floating through the air; in the collection this was formulated in garments that were layered and draped around the body, moving from shades of white to a kaleidoscopic collage of green, purple and yellow. Several of the garments were made, in the brand’s typically innovative style, from a single square of fabric, a fact demonstrated at the show’s close, where models undid garments until they were a square of material, brandishing them like flags and darting around the runway. ‘We wanted to go back to the beginning, to go back to something simple and beautiful,’ Kawahara told Wallpaper*. ‘I visualised a piece of cloth, flying away.’

READ: Inside the kaleidoscopic debut of Issey Miyake’s IM Men in Paris

Paul Smith

Last summer, as part of Pitti Uomo in Florence, Paul Smith hosted an intimate presentation which saw the designer talk through the looks in place of a runway show. ‘I think the world’s gone a bit mad with these shows everywhere around the world,’ he said at the time. ‘I think it’s so lacking in personality. So I thought, why don’t I just talk to everyone and show the collection?’ It worked: Smith is a natural raconteur, and to hear him talk about clothing – the cut of a lapel, the origin of a fabric, the history of a silhouette – is a pleasure.

Which is why, on Tuesday afternoon in Paris, he chose to continue the format, inviting guests into his Rue des Archives offices to talk them through his A/W 2025 collection (on the ground floor, the same ‘Bar Paul’ from Florence had been erected, serving coffee to the gathered guests). This season, he was thinking about photography: holding up a camera he had been gifted by his father, Harold B Smith, as a child, he credited the medium with teaching him to ‘look and see’. Though it was his father’s photography which provided the nexus of the collection, a series of his images of flowers appearing as prints on shirts and ties (the original photographs appeared in books left on each attendee’s seat). Even the presentation space was entered through a recreation of his father’s dark room.

Smith also looked towards the uniform of British photographer and friend David Bailey – who had spoken at his father’s camera club in the 1960s in Nottinghamshire – with military-inspired jackets and plays on the type of heritage fabrics worn in the era, including houndstooth and ‘thornproof’ tweed (named for its double-weave strength). He also revealed an upcoming collaboration with Barbour, which, in typical Smith style, saw the famous wax jacket’s linings adorned with prints of cows, while colourful hoods could be mixed and matched. They felt befitting to his particular – and much beloved – brand of British eccentricity, on full display here. ‘Now it’s time for the photo op,’ he joked at the show’s end, posing on stage with his cast of models, much to the gathered crowd’s delight.

Lemaire

Christophe Lemaire and Sarah-Linh Tran are steadfast in the evolutionary nature of the Lemaire wardrobe, meaning that its runway shows – held in the intimate surroundings of the pair’s serene Place des Vosges offices and atelier – do not always feel revelatory in terms of thematics or trends. This is not a bad thing: having built a $100-million-dollar business, their sensitively constructed collections capture a more pragmatic beauty, which is rooted in everyday style. This season, they said they were thinking about ‘real characters… their individuality, desires and sartorial needs’, demonstrated here through the kind of subtle but unexpected gestures which have become Lemaire’s signature: a headscarf crafted from leather not silk, magnifying glass-shaped jewellery created in collaboration with modernist artisan Carl Auböck, the matching red of a skirt, shoes and hosiery, all worn together. Dance was one inspiration: the pair imagined a dancer throwing a coat over soft cotton vests and tights after a rehearsal (suspender details were also a nod to dancewear). Fabrication, as ever, was key: several of the looks were monochrome, though in a multitude of layers and textures, from soft washed-out and satin-finish cotton to the sheen of leather. They looked a pleasure to wear.

Louis Vuitton

‘The artistic manifestation of a friendship for life,’ described Pharrell Williams of his latest Louis Vuitton menswear collection, which saw the multi-hyphenate designer collaborate with Tokyo streetwear legend Nigo, the founder of A Bathing Ape and current creative director of Kenzo. Since meeting in the early 2000s, the pair have shared a ‘creative synergy’ – they would create Billionaire Boys Club and Ice Cream in 2003 – celebrated in the Louvre showspace, which featured a number of vitrines containing pieces from each of their personal archives (from rails of clothing to CDs, sneakers, tapes, trunks and luggage).

Indeed, the eclectic, freewheeling collection felt like a journey through the pair’s fixations, taking workwear silhouettes – carpenter pants, denim, bomber jackets and blousons – and elevating them through fabric and embellishment, whether crystal adornment or camouflage damier leather (though there was also strong tailoring, too, the silhouette comprising a boxy blazer worn with gently flared trousers which puddled at the ankle). More playful elements – like a lobster-shaped handbag or a pink ‘cherry blossom’ damier check – reflected both designers’ love of Japanese street culture.

The finale saw the pair taking a shared bow, while post-show guests mingled to take in some of the extraordinary objects on display, a minuscule slice of Nigo’s legendary archive, which numbers 10,000 pieces of workwear, streetwear and ephemera. ‘[It’s] a conversation between the past and future,’ Williams described. ‘[A] gaze into the future through the telescope of history.’

READ: Pharrell Williams’ latest Louis Vuitton show celebrates a ‘friendship for life’ with streetwear legend Nigo

Auralee

A quiet confidence exudes from Ryota Iwai’s Auralee, reflected in a growing buzz around the Tokyo-based label, which, despite having been in business for ten years, is only now gaining prominence outside of its native Japan (it is a favourite among many fashion insiders). For A/W 2025, Iwai continued his exploration of the everyday wardrobe, enlivening its components through intriguing fabrications and unexpected colour combinations. There was an enveloping faux-fur jacket worn with a perfect blue shirt collar poking out from beneath, fuzzy mittens which hung around the neck, a pair of carpenter pants gently splashed with paint, colourful striped knitwear, and charming shrunken hoodies and cardigans – our wish list went on.

‘I drew inspiration from a friend whose effortless individuality struck me. Whether dressed in an elegant suit one day or their old worn-out T-shirt the next, they always exuded a sense of unapologetic authenticity,’ Iwai explained of the collection’s starting point. ‘It’s about the relationship between personal artefacts and the modern wardrobe: an old leather jacket from [your] younger days, a knit cardigan, now too small, that still offers comfort and reassurance. [With this collection] we aim to honour these keepsakes and mementoes... A place where your old favourite T-shirt carries the same significance as a luxurious cashmere coat.’

Stay tuned for more from Paris Fashion Week Men’s A/W 2025.