By Giulia Piceni. Cover image Jil Sander, Gucci and Bottega Veneta courtesy.
SS26 in Milan: Here’s Who Debuted
The runways of Milan have often been presented as a theatre of continuity, a place where heritage is protected and aesthetic codes are carefully transmitted from one designer to the next. For SS 26, however, Milan became a laboratory of reckoning. The Italian capital of fashion was less a backdrop for extravagant gestures and more a stage for the testing of ideas, an arena where the act of debuting felt unusually charged.
Behind the swirl of lights, velvet invitations and crowded front rows, a larger narrative was unfolding. Many of these new creative appointments are the result of deliberate strategies on the part of fashion’s most powerful conglomerates, whose recent financial results have signal a climate of uncertainty. In an industry that thrives on constant renewal, the installation of new designers is both a gamble and a statement of intent. The aim is to reverse the stagnation of recent years by recapturing cultural attention and, with it, consumer desire. Fashion today is less about deep narrative and more about immediate impact. We consume images so rapidly that garments often become hits rather than stories. Milan Fashion Week addressed this reality with four debuts that, each in their own register, attempted to resist superficiality while still courting relevance.
Versace by Dario Vitale: A Debut Between Heritage and Provocation
The arrival of Dario Vitale at Versace was the sort of appointment that inevitably draws both scrutiny and expectation. Vitale, an alumnus of the four-year Fashion Design program at Istituto Marangoni Milano, comes from Miu Miu, where his dual role as design director and image director made him fluent in balancing commercial clarity with cultural statement. For his Versace debut, he chose the Biblioteca Ambrosiana as the venue, a Renaissance institution heavy with historical resonance, and in doing so placed his collection in dialogue with a tradition larger than fashion itself.The clothes were unmistakably Versace in their exuberance, yet Vitale was careful to avoid a mere archival reenactment. Leather gilets embroidered with baroque detail called to mind the brand’s mythic identity as a house of ornament. Denim in vivid tones evoked the Versace Jeans Couture campaigns of the 1990s, photographed by Bruce Weber and associated with the decade’s supermodel mythology. Draped dresses incorporated harlequin-like diamond motifs, a reference to a print once seen on Julia Roberts at Venice.
What gave Vitale’s debut significance was less the accumulation of references than the courage to treat them with irreverence. Versace has always existed at the edge of respectability, and Gianni Versace himself was often criticised for collections that blurred into provocation, from bondage leather to unabashed glamour. Vitale made it clear in the letter that accompanied his debut that he does not intend to sanctify elegance, describing respectability as a demand he finds absurd. In that sense, he positioned himself in continuity with Gianni’s resistance to bourgeois convention. The result was a collection that read not as nostalgia but as a confrontation with the idea of what it means to be Versace in an era where joy risks being mistaken for frivolity.
Bottega Veneta by Louise Trotter: a New Chapter in Intrecciato
If Versace’s stage was a palimpsest of references, Louise Trotter approached Bottega Veneta with the meticulous care of someone rethreading a legacy. Her appointment followed the departure of Matthieu Blazy, who left the house to become creative director at Chanel, and she brought with her a long career across brands such as Joseph, Carven, and Lacoste. Trotter is not a designer of shock but of sustained craft, and her debut at Bottega Veneta suggested a philosophy in which the codes of the house are not treated as relics but as living materials. At the centre of her vision was the Intrecciato, the woven leather motif that has been Bottega’s signature since its founding. Rather than treating it as a decorative element, she turned it into an architecture of identity, extending it into shoes, trousers, coats and sculptural dresses. In her hands, weaving became less about surface and more about structure, a way of embodying the tension between individuality and unity. She described it as the intertwining of differences into something stronger, a metaphor that resonated with Bottega’s discreet tradition of luxury.
The collection was marked by an almost obsessive attention to detail. Montgomery toggles, sharply cut lapels, reworked classics such as the Knot bag, and a rhythm of scarves and belts that grounded the looks: each element suggested a designer who does not seek drama but insists on coherence. The gesture also reached back to Laura Braggion, the first woman to lead Bottega Veneta in the 1980s and 1990s, who advanced the idea of soft functionality. Trotter’s version of this principle was to push the extraordinary into dialogue with the ordinary, to insist that even the most sculptural garment can participate in the vocabulary of daily life. The choice of soundtrack, juxtaposing Nina Simone with David Bowie, was not incidental. It underscored her thesis: that disparate elements can coexist to form a new whole. Her Bottega was less about spectacle than about trust in construction, a statement of resilience in a market addicted to rapid novelty.
Jil Sander by Simone Bellotti: A Debut Balancing Rigour and Fragility
Simone Bellotti’s turn at Jil Sander was, in many ways, the most perilous. Minimalism, once the house’s radical identity, has, in recent decades, been so widely imitated that its sharpness has dulled. To inherit such a legacy is to risk either irrelevance or repetition. Bellotti, whose background includes many years at Gucci and a recent chapter at Bally, approached the task with a blend of severity and tenderness. The runway was stark, almost clinical, with a curved black line slicing through the white floor. It was a gesture that foreshadowed the collection itself, which played with interruptions in otherwise precise tailoring.
His suits and coats exuded an air of rational order, yet pleats appeared unexpectedly, raw hems revealed slivers of skin, and the logic of minimalism was subverted by hints of vulnerability. Bellotti invoked the history of the brand, founded by Jil Sander in Hamburg in 1968, but insisted on locating it in Milan’s present. In his own words, he was exploring the dialogue between places and times, between Hamburg and Milan, between history and now.
The risk of minimalism in 2025 is its familiarity. Fast fashion has long turned pared-down silhouettes into a universal vocabulary, stripping them of their intellectual charge. Bellotti’s response was to insist that minimalism must not be synonymous with absence but with clarity. His tailoring suggested not austerity but intimacy, the idea that restraint can still reveal emotion. In this sense, his debut felt less like a manifesto and more like a plea: that fashion still has space for rigour when rigour is accompanied by fragility.
Gucci by Demna: The Tiger – A Cinematic Fashion Debut for SS26
No debut in Milan carried the symbolic weight of Gucci’s. The appointment of Demna, long associated with Balenciaga and with a vocabulary of deconstruction, was greeted as both a shock and an inevitability. For his first statement, he chose not a runway but a film. Titled The Tiger, it was directed by Spike Jonze and Halina Reijn and premiered during Milan Fashion Week. In its thirty minutes, it presented the Spring Summer 2026 collection as a cinematic allegory of family, collapse, and release.
The film cast Demi Moore as Barbara Gucci, the matriarch of a dynasty exhausted by the burden of perfection. Around her unfolded a tableau of archetypes: the pampered son, the aloof diva, the society matron. The setting was one of fading splendour, a dining room that seemed on the edge of implosion. When an unexpected twist disrupted the dinner, order gave way to chaos, and in the process the collection itself was revealed as a meditation on tension. Clothes oscillated between rigorous tailoring and dishevelled ease, between symmetry and collapse.
At its core, The Tiger asked what it means to surrender. The title question, “What would you do if locked in a room with a tiger?”, hovered over the film as both metaphor and provocation. Demna suggested that the answer is to let go, a lesson he confessed to having learned in the process of creating this debut. For a designer once known for controlling every aspect of his narrative, to cede authority to filmmakers was itself a radical gesture. Gucci under Demna announced itself not with the authority of spectacle but with the humility of release. It was a reminder that vulnerability, when embraced rather than concealed, can become a new form of strength.
