LONDON — British designers are all quickly flocking to Milan Men’s Fashion Week to showcase their designs and scale up their business.
That includes Andreas Kronthaler, who is taking Vivienne Westwood’s spring 2026 men’s collection to join the Milan calendar along with other brands including Dunhill and Paul Smith.
“Milan is the home of menswear and it’s wonderful to come back here and show our men’s collection — it’s exciting for us. Our company has been half Italian for decades; lots of what we do is produced in Italy,” said Kronthaler in an interview.
The Vivienne Westwood line has been unveiled in London since 2017 for both men’s and women’s, but is now being separated to spotlight the different business categories, an instinctive decision for Kronthaler.
“We are doing this because it feels right again to present menswear separate to womenswear — we were one of the first houses to put the two together. When a man has style, it means so much — it’s such a great thing, I’m always so thrilled to see it. It has nothing to do with fashion, it’s about style,” he added.
The save the date invitation for Vivienne Westwood’s spring 2026 men’s show.
Courtesy of Vivienne Westwood
The brand is starting off modestly with a “presentation,” or what he characterized as “a mini, mini show, not a runway show.”
Kronthaler has high hopes for January next year, where he wants to stage a “proper runway show.”
The spring 2026 men’s collection will riff off the brand coming back to Milan and exploring the duality of Englishness with a Mediterranean approach.
“The inspiration started with the idea of coming back to Milan, it’s about the mix — the Englishness with the Mediterranean way of life. There’s a big tradition of the English appreciation for Italy (from the Renaissance onward) — they brought a certain way of dressing here and the Italians made it their own,” Kronthaler reiterated.
In typical Vivienne Westwood fashion, the collection will play with light fabrics and an array of colors and prints.
Kronthaler was mainly thinking about summer when designing the collection with his team.
“The look — is a dandy of today,” he added.
The dandy has been a hot subject so far this year with the opening of the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s Costume Institute’s “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style” exhibition that focuses on menswear, notably Black menswear.
The Vivienne Westwood collection will have all the tropes of the dandy with a strong focus on tailoring and distinct pieces, but Kronthaler is taking it one step further by adding an element of fluidness.
“Our collections have always been fluid — it’s normal for us. People should wear what they want, people should be who they want, think what they want and say what they want — it goes hand in hand,” he explained.
The designer also used the creation of this collection as a way to push back against the ongoing global political and economic turmoil.
“The more I hear about the world, the more it is driven by anxiousness and negativity — it pushes me to do things which are happy and joyful. Fashion is an escape,” said Kronthaler.
The Vivienne Westwood brand has always been vocal about its stance on climate change and the current political landscape through its collections.
The late designer, who was Kronthaler’s partner in life and work, said in 2018 that she uses fashion as a “vehicle for activism, to stop climate change and mass extinction of life on earth. The need to live in harmony with the planet is a matter of life and death.”
Kronthaler is continuing that message in his own way, perhaps through rose-tinted glasses.
