In Milan, Men Win Supporting Roles

MILAN — There they were. You could choose your own metaphor based on your particular outlook. The barbarians at the gate? The late-comers to the party? Whatever else they were, at women’s fashion week, or Milano Moda Donna as the Italians call it, they were everywhere: men.

From the first day, at Gucci, where they hid behind masks and were girded with spike collars (not, in all likelihood, for sale, the designer Alessandro Michele said, for anyone who was curious) to nearly the last, where they bobbed in the wine-dark sea of Giorgio Armani’s black-and-navy processional, they spanned the week.

You couldn’t fairly say that they dominated it. The women on the runways, with their stern, set expressions, stalking in their fearsome heels (this was a week to remind you that our word “stiletto” derives from the Italian for “little dagger”), were too powerful and too numerous for that. It was more like a Sadie Hawkins Day, and women’s wear, with the power all on its side, had invited the men to the dance.

The reasons are easy enough to guess. While it remains, at least for the moment, a smaller part of the business than women’s wear, men’s wear has been growing explosively in recent years. And the heads of luxury brands have noticed the change with evident pleasure.

“It’s more than a buzz. It’s a deeper trend,” Sidney Toledano, chairman and chief executive of LVMH’s Fashion Group, told Reuters last year about the rising tide of men’s wear. Cédric Charbit, the chief executive of Balenciaga at Kering, LVMH’s rival, said at a Financial Times luxury conference last year that men represented the label’s fastest-growing category of shoppers. And some market research, like that conducted by Euromonitor, has even suggested that sales of men’s wear are on track to outpace women’s in the near future. Add that to the fact that a full-scale runway show may cost well into six figures, and the most elaborate may rise to seven.

Presenting a unified collection while saving costs is a powerful draw, especially at a moment when fashion shows are as much a public entertainment as an industry invitational, and wherever and whenever they occur, they are ultimately destined to live where we increasingly all do: online.

For the designers and creators in Milan, the argument was more frequently one of creativity and coherence than commerce. Angela Missoni, who runs her family’s namesake knitwear label, invoked, in her own fashion, the old wisdom about measuring twice to cut once.

“I love men’s and women’s together,” she said, standing before a blue-glitter backdrop that matched her blue-glitter runway and the glittery knits that she showed for men and women alike. “It helps to bring it together. It makes you think in a more clear direction. Instead of thinking twice, you think once and you try to keep it together.”

Clarity was the virtue cited as well by Paul Andrew of Salvatore Ferragamo, who was elevated last week from women’s creative director to creative director of the entire brand, men’s and women’s alike.

“When I started as creative director, the company had so many aesthetic visions, and when you went into a Ferragamo store, it was like schizophrenia,” he said. “You didn’t really know where to put your eye. Now you go into the store and there’s one complete vision between men’s and women’s.”

A complete vision does not mean one in which gender does not figure. For all the talk in American circles about the rise of genderless or gender-nonconforming fashion, the runways of Milan felt coed, rather than gender-agnostic.

In many cases, pieces and motifs were appropriated for men and women, like the motorcycle-style leather jackets and pants or the gaping, open-plan knitwear of Daniel Lee’s first show for Bottega Veneta, or the ripcord-cinching jackets of Mr. Andrew’s Ferragamo. At Paul Surridge’s show for Roberto Cavalli, his Modernist tiger print — to my eye, it looked more like a wavy surrealist seascape in de Chirico colors but it wouldn’t be Cavalli without an animal print, I suppose — and a free hand with sequins showered men and women both.

The danger is, rarely do men and women look equally good in a piece. (Vogue sniffed that the motorcycle leather pieces were “more believable on the men.”) So when each keeps more or less to his or her own, bringing them into formation, merged like lanes on a roadway, only heightens the dissonance.

So it was that Mr. Armani’s ponytailed gentlemen, in their check suits and blue-on-black formal wear, gave the sense of being mere walkers to his women. Which was almost a shame, when you recalled that Mr. Armani, who started his label decades ago with men’s wear, revolutionized women’s wear by dappling it with the style and shape from the other side of that divide.

And across that same divide came the editors of several men’s magazines, who appeared in their front row seats this week at the handful of shows with mixed casts. They are usually creatures of Milano Modo Uomo, the men-specific week that takes place in January and June, and bobbled around during women’s like cheerful visitors with newly stamped passports. (It didn’t hurt that the schedule for these aisle-crossers included ample windows for lunch.)

“You know me, I love a cohesive message,” Matthew Marden, the style director of Esquire, said when asked how he was finding the shows. He might have spoken for Milan’s conflicted stance on men’s versus women’s when he nodded at the relaxing standards of gendered clothing.

“Everything is so fluid these days, it’s kind of fun,” he said. “The lines continue to blur between what is women’s wear, what is men’s wear.”

And then, he added, after a pause and with a chuckle, “Within reason.”