Milan Fashion Week AW26 was a season of seismic arrivals. Demna showed his first Gucci collection. Maria Grazia Chiuri debuted at Fendi. Meryll Rogge reimagined Marni. Louise Trotter made Bottega Veneta her own. And through it all, Prada remained Prada — which is to say, essential. Here are the five shows that defined the week.
Prada: Sixty looks, fifteen models, zero excess
Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons continue to operate as if fashion’s primary function is intellectual provocation. Their AW26 collection sent sixty looks down the runway on just fifteen models — a casting decision that forced the audience to see each woman as a character developing across the show rather than a vessel for a single outfit. The effect was closer to theatre than fashion, which is likely the point.
The clothes themselves worked the territory Prada has staked out over the past several seasons: rigorous tailoring that stops short of severity, surface decoration that reveals itself gradually, and a colour palette — mineral grey, petroleum blue, a particular shade of burnt rose — that seemed to have been selected by someone who distrusts anything that could be called cheerful. The standout pieces were the coats: mid-calf, slightly oversized, with a construction that suggested they would improve with a decade of hard wear. Prada at its most Prada, which remains the highest compliment available in fashion.
Prada FW26 details. Photography courtesy of CR Fashion Book
Gucci: Demna arrives, and the house holds its breath
The appointment of Demna — who continues to use only his first name, a practice that functions as both personal brand and quiet refusal of convention — to Gucci was the most scrutinised creative director move of the decade. His first collection for the house was always going to be read as a statement of intent, and he delivered one that was characteristically oblique.
Gone was Tom Ford’s sensuality, gone was Alessandro Michele’s maximalism. In their place: a stripped-back, almost brutalist approach to Italian luxury. Sharp-shouldered jackets in stiff fabrics. Trousers cut with a severity that owed more to architecture than to tailoring. Accessories reduced to essentials — a single bag shape in three sizes, monochrome, with the double-G hardware rendered in blackened metal rather than gold. The audience was divided, which is how Demna prefers things. The clothes were technically impeccable. Whether they were Gucci is a question that will take several seasons to resolve.
“Milan AW26 was not a season of evolution. It was a season of arrivals — of designers walking into storied houses and declaring, with varying degrees of diplomacy, that the furniture is being rearranged.”
Fendi: Maria Grazia Chiuri crosses the border
After nearly a decade at Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri’s move to Fendi returned her to the house where she began her luxury career — she had been accessories director there in the early 2000s. Her debut collection acknowledged this personal history without dwelling on it. The Fendi she showed was softer than the Fendi of recent seasons, more interested in how women actually move through the world than in how they photograph for street-style blogs.
The standout pieces were the fur treatments — Fendi’s ancestral territory — reworked with a lightness that felt contemporary rather than nostalgic. Shearling vests over flowing silk dresses. Mink trims on tailored coats that were otherwise stark in their restraint. Chiuri’s feminism, which at Dior sometimes announced itself through sloganeering, here expressed itself structurally: the clothes moved with the body, made room for it, declined to constrict.
Marni: Meryll Rogge makes the city her stage
Meryll Rogge, the Belgian designer who has brought an outsider’s eye to the Italian house, staged her AW26 show as a love letter to Milan itself. The venue was an industrial space in the Tortona district, but the collection drew its energy from the city’s operatic tradition. References to Maria Callas and Pier Paolo Pasolini threaded through the collection — not as literal costume but as a sensibility. The drama was in the draping. The intellectualism was in the cut.
Rogge’s Marni has always been more cerebral than commercial, and this collection doubled down on that position. Dresses that appeared simple from the front revealed complex construction from the side. Layering was used not decoratively but architecturally — each piece functioning as both garment and commentary on garment. The effect was theatrical in the truest sense: carefully staged, deeply considered, and absolutely committed to its own logic.
Bottega Veneta: Louise Trotter plays the long game
Louise Trotter’s second collection for Bottega Veneta confirmed what her first suggested: she is building something slowly and deliberately, with no interest in the viral moment. Where her predecessor Daniel Lee made Bottega a social media phenomenon through accessories and a particular shade of green, Trotter is repositioning the house around materials and construction — the things you feel rather than see.
The leather pieces were extraordinary. Coats that moved like fabric. Skirts with a weight and fall that made everything else on the schedule look thin by comparison. The colour palette was subdued — stone, smoke, deep navy, a single flash of terracotta — and the silhouettes were deliberately understated. This was fashion for people who already know what they like and are not looking to be told. It was also, quietly, the most technically accomplished collection of the week.
Milan AW26 will be remembered as the season when the city’s great houses changed hands and, in changing, changed the conversation. Whether these new voices sustain the energy of their debuts or settle into something more cautious will be the story of the next several seasons. For now, the opening statements have been made. Milan is paying attention.