As the dust settles on men’s fashion month, an afterglow clings to Satoshi Kuwata’s Setchu Autumn/Winter 2025 show, which scores of buyers and press note as a season highlight. Taking the guest designer slot for Pitti Uomo, the Japanese LVMH Prize winner presented a visual experiment in classicism, panelling and splicing tailcoats and Savile Row suiting for a collection at once simple and compellingly avant-garde — a trope that, in an increasingly tricky economic climate, may become essential.
“Our clients are tired of seeing the same products everywhere — they want something special,” says Kuwata, whose clothes are relatively (although duly) expensive, retailing from €250 to €3,500. “I’ve never tried to create expensive products,” he adds. “It just happens that they have certain prices.”
The men’s fashion month calendar has been shrinking since the late 2010s. London Fashion Week Men’s stopped in 2017, with Burberry having shown co-ed since 2016. As for Milan, Gucci, Fendi and JW Anderson didn’t show this season, while New York currently only has a single menswear day, presented biannually. With fewer initiatives available for menswear — Fashion East Man shuttered in 2019, too — and a worldwide luxury fashion slump, a merge-and-mix approach has subsumed a lot of the West’s menswear output.
From a zoomed-out lens, personal luxury goods have shown a decrease in market share for the first time in 15 years — bar, of course, during the Covid period when spending dropped incrementally — according to Bain & Co. Exacerbated by volatile markets and inflation, many conglomerate-owned labels have hiked prices, leading to a consumer base contraction of some 50 million people in 2024 and a profitability dip among brands. If there was one phrase that defined boardroom conversations across fashion house C-suites last financial year, it was the luxury slowdown, aka the inverse to post-lockdown’s revenge spending.
The curveball was Japan, which witnessed the world’s fastest growth in luxury sales over the past year, as well as mid-single-digit growth in menswear from 2019 to 2023, continuing an upward trajectory into 2024. “Despite a noted global slowdown in the luxury market in 2024, Japanese menswear has performed strongly,” confirms Bain senior partner Federica Levato. “Japan’s menswear market demonstrates unique strengths that contribute to its resilience and growth,” she adds, citing a “seamless integration of tradition and innovation”, “functional aesthetics”, “highly localised yet globally appealing collections”, “quality” and “meticulous attention to detail”.
