Milan Fashion Week SS27: Do the clothes survive the spectacle?
The Milan Fashion Week SS27 shows put theatre, retail experiments and Broadway-style performances around the clothes. But did they really deserve the applause?
At Milan Fashion Week SS27, amid all this spectacle, what remains of fashion? What remains of the garments themselves? In Milan, the show surrounding them often proved more memorable than what walked the runway. Vogue World: Milano 2026 staged a five-act production in Milan’s Galleria; Gucci turned its runway into a boutique; at Moschino, the debut of new creative directors Loris Messina and Simone Rizzo brought a crowd of everyday figures onto the catwalk alongside the models. Then there were the products. La Perla returned from the brink of bankruptcy with historic designs reworked for Collection #00, while Gucci’s Drip sneaker put “Made in China” in tension with a much-hyped house built on Italian craftsmanship. Angelo Ruggeri—Journalist and Tutor for Styling, Business and Design Courses and Master’s Programmes, Milan—looks at what happens when the event begins to overshadow the garment, asking whether quality and visual force can still make us desire the piece itself.
There was a moment during Milan Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2027 when I genuinely wondered whether I was still at Fashion Week or had accidentally bought a ticket to Broadway. As it turned out, it was both. The theatrical side of the runway is hardly new, but in Milan the machinery around the clothes was impossible to miss. Shows sang, acted, built enormous sets, recruited hundreds of extras, brought archives back into circulation and turned themselves into social media content before anyone had time to work out what had actually walked down the runway. Milan SS27 became a test of the format—not because spectacle had just arrived, but because it could make the clothes compete for attention. The result was intriguing precisely because it wasn’t always convincing.
What Does Vogue World Milano Present Without Its Own Collection?
Let’s begin with the show within the show. Unlike the other shows in this review, Vogue World Milano 2026 was not a presentation of a single fashion house’s collection. Given the immense effort involved, it felt like a Hollywood production transplanted into Milan as much as a traditional fashion show. That breadth is central to its appeal. The event was ambitious in scale, with famous names, music, dance, and energy to match: everything turned up as high as it could go.
The question is not fashion’s relationship with entertainment—that has always been part of the spectacle—but how the two can work together. How much of Vogue World Milano 2026 was aimed at fashion audiences, and how much was a large-scale entertainment performance with fashion at its centre?
Fashion and entertainment demand different things from their audience. A fashion show should make you want to see, understand, and ideally own the clothes. A performance should make you want to applaud. When the two meet, the result can be magic. When one takes precedence, you may leave thinking, “That was amazing,” without being able to recall exactly which pieces you actually saw.
At Vogue World, however, the premise was different. No single label presented a collection merely for its own sale. Organised by a major publishing group—an important departure from the usual format—the show invited audiences to embrace fashion as a whole: to love it again and respond with warmth.
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Why Did Gucci Turn Its SS27 Fashion Show Into a Store?
Then there was Gucci. Or, more accurately, the giant Gucci store. The house created a runway setup that essentially recreated a Gucci boutique on an XXL scale. A gigantic temple of consumption, almost a Disneyland of luxury.
The irony is that while everyone talks about e-commerce, omnichannel strategies, AI-assisted shopping, and digital retail, someone at Gucci apparently remembered that people are still supposed to walk into stores. So why not build the runway inside one?
The logic is almost perfect: if you’re not going to the boutique anymore, we’ll build one so enormous you might want to return. At least that’s the hope.
The Gucci SS27 fashion show became a giant retail experience. It wasn’t just, “Here’s the collection.” It is, “Here’s the world we want you to buy into.”
Luxury does not sell just a product. It sells an environment, an image, a social position, and a feeling of belonging. The danger, of course, is that the consumer looks at all of this and thinks: very nice, but how much is the sneaker?
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What Does Gucci’s “Made in China” Sneaker Mean for Luxury?
And this is where Gucci becomes even more interesting. The new Drip, Demna’s first sneaker for Gucci, lacks the reassuring “Made in Italy” label. Instead, it is made in China.
This is not to suggest that products made in China are less sophisticated or desirable—that argument would be outdated and simplistic. Rather, Gucci has built much of its symbolic value around Italian craftsmanship.
“Made in Italy” has never been just a geographic indication; it is woven into the very fabric of Gucci’s narrative. That is why a seemingly innocent sneaker now stands as a symbol of something much bigger: how flexible can the idea of luxury be when luxury itself has to rethink costs, production, volume, accessibility, and desirability?
Gucci is also trying to reconnect with aspirational customers who are increasingly price-sensitive. The focus is shifting from where an object is made to how much we are willing to pay for the story it tells.
What Is La Perla Bringing Back With Collection #00?
Amid all the spectacle, one of Milan’s most interesting stories was actually a comeback: La Perla is back.
The Bologna-based label, founded in 1954 and long synonymous with sophisticated lingerie, femininity, and seduction, presented Collection #00 at a cocktail event for industry insiders. After years away from the scene, La Perla is switching the lights back on, combining new pieces with historic house designs reimagined for a contemporary woman.
The challenge is to avoid recreating La Perla of the Eighties, turning the archive into a museum or treating lace as nostalgia. What remains relevant now? Frastaglio, soutache, Leavers lace, Cornely embroidery, and macramé evoke an atelier culture that can feel like it belongs to another era. Alongside that comes a more contemporary athleisure vocabulary. Seduction hasn’t disappeared; it has simply changed clothes.
La Perla is therefore restarting with a “00” rather than a “01”—almost as if to say: let’s reset everything and see what happens
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Why Did Moschino Put Everyday Life on the Runway?
And then there was Moschino. Or rather, Loris Messina and Simone Rizzo.
When the duo who founded Sunnei took over Moschino, the obvious question was: how much Moschino would actually remain? Judging from this show, less than some people expected—which may not be a bad thing.
On the rooftop of Milan’s Unipol Dome in Santa Giulia, more than 400 extras crossed the runway in the opposite direction from the models. Men and women of different ages, shapes and ethnicities carried bicycles, suitcases, gym bags and smartphones; some held children by the hand.
It looked less like a conventional fashion show and more like a subway platform suddenly turned into theatre. The image inevitably recalled The Verve’s “Bitter Sweet Symphony”, with its relentless walking against the flow. But the real point was the attempt to change the language of the fashion show itself.
Messina and Rizzo draw on their Sunnei experience, where they repeatedly manipulated the runway format and turned it into something else: stage diving, auctions, races, and audience participation. Here, the message was even clearer: the runway doesn’t have to be a line of models walking in front of seated guests. It can be a street, a performance, a slice of the city. And yes, it looked more Sunnei than Moschino. But the real mistake would have been to deliver yet another conventional Moschino show.
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Is the Fashion Show Format Becoming the Collection?
The common thread of Milan Fashion Week Spring/Summer 2027 wasn’t a colour, a silhouette or a particular aesthetic obsession: it was the format.
Vogue World Milano 2026 turned fashion into a cinematic production. Gucci built a gigantic store. Moschino turned the runway into a crowded city street. Everything pointed in the same direction: fashion is searching for new ways to hold attention.
Selling clothes alone is not enough: you need an experience, images, content, and shareability. You need a story. The danger, however, is that fashion becomes nothing more than entertainment—an enormous machine producing beautiful, spectacular, Instagram-ready moments that vanish twenty-four hours later.
What Is a Fashion Show For?
And this is where I still have a bit of a problem. All of this is fascinating, clever, and undeniably contemporary. But when I go to Fashion Week, I still want to see fashion. I want to fall in love with a coat. I want to debate a silhouette. I want to leave a show feeling inspired to change something in my wardrobe.
Because, ultimately, fashion is simple: it has to make us want something.
Want to wear. Want to look. Want to desire. Want to change.
Everything else—musicals, mega-stores, rooftops, extras, celebrities, storytelling, heritage, and retail experiences—is part of the elaborate world built around that simple idea. Sometimes necessary, sometimes brilliant, it can give fashion scale and resonance beyond the runway.
Milan Fashion Week SS27 reminded us of this simple truth: fashion is not just what appears on the runway. It is everything that happens before, during, and after. The risk is forgetting the clothes. The challenge is making sure all that spectacle ultimately brings us back to them: a dress, a shoe, a piece of lingerie, an idea. That fleeting, irrational moment when you look at something and think: “Okay. I want that.” That is where real fashion still begins.
Angelo Ruggeri
Journalist and Tutor for Styling, Business and Design Courses and Master’s Programmes, Milan
