Milan Fashion Week arrived with its usual polish, but this season felt unusually light on its feet. Across the city, designers leaned into fluidity, layering, and a kind of restless elegance, collections that asked how classics could be rewritten rather than repeated. Prada distilled chaos into clarity, N°21 turned obsession into sheer overlays, and Sportmax made organza trenches and blurred lips look impossibly cool. If London belonged to the tribes, Milan belonged to the masters of recomposition: designers dissecting and reshaping codes until something sharper, freer, and distinctly modern emerged.

Jil Sander
Caterina Guarna

Jil Sander was known as the queen of less and Simone Bellotti’s first collection as the brand’s creative director posed the question: Does lessness allow for moreness? SS26 jumpstarted a search, a discovery, of how to make such less his own.

The collection was defined by symbiotic pairs, at times distant, at times opposite, which, nonetheless, found themselves conversing through Bellotti’s work — Milan and Hamburg, history and now, control and freedom, strictness and lightness. Models walked in the Jil Sander HQ, to the sounds of Italian artist Bochum Welt.

These interconnected oppositions manifested themselves in an array of dusty pastels and vibrant hues, severe lines and drowsed neutrals, smooth fabrics and in-depth textures. Transparencies and cut-outs allowed for the body to peek through and the clothes. It is discovery that signifies this season; with a collection which poses as a dialogue between the history of Jil Sander and the moreness of Bellotti’s fresh start.

N°21 
Eve Bailey 

In Milan, Alessandro Dell’Acqua offered a masterclass in layering that was all about lightness. For SS26 at N°21, chiffon slipped over chiffon, lace bras peeked beneath side-slit dresses, and brocade shorts emerged. It was a collection obsessed with transparency, airy, sensual, and slightly subversive.

Wilted-flower pins in chiffon and even steel plate, sweaters knotted nonchalantly over shoulders, and feathers reimagined as chiffon petals gave the looks an undone richness. Gold lamé plissé skirts shimmered beside mannish bombers and linen anoraks cut like capes, while crochet macramé mimicked bloomers in a playful wink at underwear-as-outerwear. Menswear filtered in too, with shirting and jackets woven into the narrative, blurring genres with ease.

Dell’Acqua spoke of rejecting nostalgia, and it showed: the slip-dresses and chiffon overlays felt like classics rewritten, not repeated. Nº21 delivered a collection that was both delicate and defiant, layering references into a singular vision of modern femininity, sheer, strong, and a little obsessive.

Prada
Eve Bailey 

At Prada, SS26  all the rules were thrown out this season. Miuccia and Raf filtered the overload of culture into clarity, recomposing garments until categories collapsed. Skirts suspended from shoulders, bras with form but no structure, uniforms rubbing against chiffon — the kind of juxtapositions that shouldn’t work but somehow do, in that particular Prada way.

“It’s about reacting to the uncertain,” said Miuccia Prada. “Clothes that can shift, change, adapt.” That sense of adaptability defined the collection, garments recomposed into new meanings through adjacency, light in their movement yet heavy with intention.

Raf Simons framed it as freedom: “moving away from fashion as a sculptural imposition… into physical emancipation, but also freedom as a state of mind.” Together, the duo proposed clothes as tools of survival, of agency, of elegance without prescription.

What emerged was not sculpture but fluidity, not hierarchy but possibility, a wardrobe built to adapt as quickly and restlessly as the world around it.

Sportmax
Eve Bailey 

At Sportmax, the mood was dreamy yet razor-sharp. Jewellery chimed softly as models walked, blurred dark lips giving a gothic edge to an otherwise ethereal palette. It was elegance laced with attitude, cool and confident.

Organza appeared everywhere: in trench coats, sheer trousers, and weightless linings that transformed the feel of tailoring. Botanical prints, painted with Japanese lipsticks and nail polish, layered transparently into optical illusions, while hand-moulded leather flowers bloomed into sculptural halter tops and bag charms.

Silhouettes balanced sharpness with ease, gilets and bras recast as outerwear, architectural knits playing with shadow, strategic cut-outs revealing skin just so. Kitten-heeled mules and a new soft bag with S-hardware completed the look: functional, sensual, built for women in motion.

Stripping away the superfluous, Sportmax landed on something lasting — grounded and graceful, but always with that flicker of fantasy

Durazzi
Caterina Guarna

Paintings suspended on a minimal landscape — classical and intense beauty opposed to an aseptic and industrial setting. Through its set design, Durazzi encapsulated the tension from which its SS26 collection, The Nymphs, was born: other-timely versus contemporary.

The models walked through the suspended paintings, embodying the nymphs portrayed in them. 

The tailoring was deconstructed and suit trousers became loose and relaxed. Movement is created through drapery in otherwise simple vest dresses and a flow akin to water converses with more structured pieces. The closing look was our standout piece: a two-piece grey suit, subverted by fringes bordering its deep v-neck collar. Some fringes were chunky chains, others arrays of different silver beads, at times simply round, at times whimsically flower-like. 

With this collection Durazzi subverts the image of the nymph and what it represents by powerfully but gracefully dressing its models in looks full of tensions and subversive contradictions.