What’s Working in a Tough Menswear Market

FLORENCE and MILAN – The two Italian labels that book-ended Pitti Uomo last week — luxury giant Brunello Cucinelli and Satoshi Kuwata’s Setchu — have something to say about what’s currently working in a tumultuous menswear market.

On Tuesday, Cucinelli feted the opening of Pitti Uomo in Florence by hosting hundreds of guests in a lavish Baroque palazzo on the River Arno. Chandeliers big enough to crush a man (or several) spun above a multi-course dinner prepared by the chefs of triple-Michelin-starred restaurant Da Vittorio. A throng of teenagers huddled outside in the cold, screaming for a chance to see Korean actor Ji-Chang Wook, a brand ambassadors flown in for the event.

In short, Cucinelli partied like it was 2022 — when the luxury industry’s sales were surging to unprecedented heights in the wake of Covid-19. The brand can afford to: its one of just a handful of listed luxury companies to have generated steady growth as the broader industry entered a downturn in 2024. Last Monday, the company reported fourth-quarter sales up 12 percent year-over-year, and full-year revenues approaching €1.3 billion ($1.34 billion).

“Consistency, quality, exclusivity,” are the pillars of Cucinelli’s continued success, chief executive Riccardo Stefanelli said a few days later at the label’s spring-summer 2025 menswear presentation in Milan. The company started in the 1970s making limited runs of fine cashmere sweaters; it’s grown into a cross-category purveyor of Italian lifestyle with over 150 retail stores selling what it calls “absolute luxuries”: €8,500 overcoats, €5,500 cashmere blazers. “We don’t believe there’s any drop in the desire for luxury — indeed we believe there’s a gap in the market for real luxury ready-to-wear,” Stefanelli said.

Pitti Uomo closed Thursday with the first runway show by Setchu, the LVMH Prize-winning, Milan-based label by Japanese designer Satoshi Kuwata. The show — featuring pleated tailoring, customisable deconstructed knits, shirt dresses and paper denim ensembles incorporating upcycled sugar cane waste — was well-attended and well-received, marking a major milestone for the fledgling brand.

A tiny fashion start-up like Setchu (an Italian teacher gives group lessons to the studio) and luxury giant Cucinelli, a purveyor of timeless style with over 300 exclusive suppliers clustered around its headquarters in Umbria, might seem to have little in common. Yet both are indicative of what’s currently working in a troubled luxury market that, according to consultancy Bain, has lost over 50 million customers over the past two years.

Top-End Propositions

The industry is rapidly upscaling as brands hike prices to cope with inflation and buoy their top lines as the post-pandemic boom fades — and that requires brands to develop exclusive products and services to help cultivate ties with the wealthiest customers, who can stomach higher prices and are more insulated from macro-economic shocks.

Both Cucinelli and Setchu say their prices reflect the quality level of their suppliers: Italian fabric mills whose hefty investments in R&D set their products apart. At a time when small designers have been broadly criticised for making their clothes prohibitively expensive for their niche audiences, Setchu has pushed the top-end of his collection even higher: some pieces were designed in collaboration with Savile Row suit shop Davies and Son, whose tailors will fly just about anywhere in the world to do the fittings for its $10,000 suits (permitted you order more than one).

Choppy Market

Of course, most brands and retailers — even luxury names — can’t credibly reposition themselves at the very top of the market, having already grown global businesses built on a far broader spectrum of customers. Sluggish demand from entry-priced and “core” luxury customers has led to steep sales declines at tent-pole brands for the Italian fashion industry, notably Gucci, whose sales fell 21 percent in the first nine months of 2024. Capri Holdings is reportedly seeking a buyer for Versace after sales fell and it turned loss-making last year.

Italian menswear has been relatively resilient, but still slowed dramatically in 2024: exports were broadly flat last year, rising less than one percent compared to 7 percent growth in 2023, and a 25 percent jump the year before that.

To get customers excited about fashion again, many luxury brands are seeking to shake things up — retooling their creative teams and commercial strategies — as a consensus emerged last year that many of them had become overpriced, overdistributed and overly homogeneous in their designs.

At the Milan menswear shows (which kicked off on Friday), not so many brands seemed ready to show off retooled visions: new designer Haider Ackermann’s debut for Tom Ford will wait for womenswear; Gucci and Fendi also both chose to hold off on men’s shows this season in favour of co-ed outings in February.

Outdoor Brands

Retailers who can’t wait for big luxury to sort itself out are seeking growth elsewhere.

Technical brands focused on skiing, hiking and other outdoor pursuits continued to gain traction at Pitti Uomo, with running in particular getting a dedicated space at the fair. New running brands have proliferated in recent years as the sport rapidly grows and becomes an increasingly social activity through run clubs and online communities like Strava.

“We’re seeing a strong positive dynamic for technical apparel — with more brands building well-being and performance elements into their offer,” said Raffaello Napoleone, CEO of organiser Pitti Imagine Srl.

“This category will continue to boom as the luxury customer continues to want ‘the best of’ offer across every element of their lifestyle,” Mytheresa buyer Sophie Jordan echoed.

Buyers from La Samaritaine department store in Paris shouted out Satisfy as a stand-out fusing running and fashion, as well as Portal, a new brand co-founded by the creative director of hiking label ROA. Bosse Myhr, buying director at Selfridges, liked the offer from hiking brand Danner.

Twisted Classics

Beyond the technical space, the menswear offer this season was generally marked by “very safe,” easy-to-wear collections, La Samaritaine buyer Clarisse De Chauton said. But they came with more details to signal creativity, personality and preciousness compared to the more essentialist wardrobe dressing of previous seasons.

Curated classics with subtle twists are certainly the bread-and-butter of Our Legacy, which showed its fall-winter collection in Milan Saturday and remained one of the most-worn brands for menswear insiders this season. The Stockholm-based brand, which announced an investment from LVMH’s Luxury Ventures arm in November, showed a bigger-than-usual co-ed collection with tuxedo-inspired jackets in washed-out grays and discreetly tie-dyed cardigans, “emphasis[ing] the tension between the sharpness of being ”on duty” and the safe anonymity of everyday life, the brand said.

Prada, which showed Sunday, leaned into embellishment to subvert and elevate the everyday: car coats were adorned with jagged, asymmetrical fur collars, teddy jackets and blazers were decorated with flower broaches. The line’s signature wonky graphic prints sneaked in where you wouldn’t expect them, with nostalgic 60s floral prints on cowboy boots and hoods. Classic blazers were interspersed with shrunken jewel-toned trousers.

Prada has been another outlier for Italian luxury, continuing to grow as rival brands contracted last year. A re-merchandised offer under co-creative director Raf Simons, with a higher proportion of easy-to-wear wardrobe pieces punctuated by logos and more directional items, has certainly helped the brand so far. Whether Prada Group can keep striking the right balance between fashion novelty and merch will be a key question in what’s expected to be another rocky year.