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Joy, slime, ‘Damouflage’, cannage, elegance, short shorts — the Spring/Summer 2024 menswear season just ended, offering a scintillating smorgasbord of wearable options for any gender in the year ahead. It was a season in which one debut undoubtedly dominated the conversation while by no means owning it: there were plenty of other highly meaningful menswear moments away from Pont Neuf.
Now the dust has settled, and the numbers are in for those who put the season’s clothes over the sideshows. The list below reveals the most-viewed men’s shows of SS24 on Vogue Runway. Some changes to last season’s tally may surprise you — others likely won’t.
10. Dior Men, rank last season: 5
Kim Jones’s fifth-anniversary collection at Dior Men was an assured and slick affair, just as you’d expect from the industry’s most organised and worked creative directors (Jones fashions four mainline shows a year, two couture collections, plus preseasons). The production was spectacular, also as you’d expect, and the house’s publicity machine ensured plenty of celebrity sizzle for social. Clothes-wise, Jones entered into a referential conversation with creative directors past (some exceptions apart), as well as the founder himself, to shape a collection that was intensely self-referential.
9: Dries Van Noten, rank last season: 10
One for the purists, this was a collection that neither sought nor required sideshow hustling to be a standout. Van Noten said it was about elegance, and just as elegant as the garments was his refusal to offer anything beyond a show of clothes. In it, he slowly and astutely peeled through several layers of menswear genres, pruning, splicing and cultivating as he went, unravelling tailoring into military and more. Van Noten’s queasy optical prints, combined with a gardener’s eye for enchantingly unusual colour combinations, added a heady visual fragrance.
8: JW Anderson, rank last season: 9
Jonathan Anderson recently told GQ Style he wishes to be the “best in his field”. Assessing whether a designer is the “best” or not is a highly subjective and crudely reductive venture; however, given that his collections feature twice on this list (sorry, spoiler), there’s no disputing that Anderson’s slow-and-steady approach is bearing fruit. Schooled by the late, great Manuela Pavesi of Prada, Anderson now has a shop of his own opposite Prada’s on Milan’s Via Sant’Andrea, where he previewed this collection. In it, he expertly worked to make the mundane extraordinary, with flashes of humour here and almost casual design gestures — like shaping the surface of one piece after the sofa in his office — there.
7: Givenchy, rank last season: 6
Narratives change. Matthew M Williams delivered his third consecutive pretty excellent menswear collection at Givenchy this season. The new, improved venue indicated an improved confidence in his performance (as well as perhaps the need to clear his old one for Dior Men). The numbers on Vogue Runway reflect buyer enthusiasm for his work too. This show marked the third anniversary of his appointment at the house and continued his late-game streak.
6: The Row, rank last season: new entry
Presented on mannequins by appointment in Paris without the designers to venture a point of view, The Row’s second season on the Vogue Runway menswear dropdown saw it mix looks worn by males with looks worn by females (and some worn by both). It’s possible this format slightly gamed the menswear metric, but there is no arguing that The Row is delivering beautiful and highly considered clothes. It would be interesting — and equitable — to see some male models walking at their Pre and Resort shows.
5: Loewe, rank last season: new entry
Another rigorously designed and unapologetically highbrow collection from Jonathan Anderson, this time at Loewe, completes his double on this season’s list. Loewe is the least bombastic of the major LVMH houses showing in Paris, yet easily amongst its most interesting in terms of output and point of view, as its position in this list testifies. At a show partly inspired by sculpture, this collection was a monument to Anderson’s distinct outlook and process.
4: Rick Owens, rank last season: 7
Even without the fireworks that rained ash and cordite on the audience visible in the Vogue Runway images, this was a banging Rick Owens show. His elegantly waisted silhouette exploded at the shoulder and leg to provide the defining line around soft and sheer sections of drape. This dark and princely look occasionally lapsed into the apparently primitive and absolutely primal. Rick rolls on.
3: Prada, rank last season: 3
The creative marriage of Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons to keep house at Prada is delivering deepening delight. This season’s slime-edged runway chapter was both sexy and cerebral, featuring some exciting evolutions of the house’s highly collectable Hawaiian shirts and the short-short of the season. People always expect Prada to be excellent: this was.
2: Vetements, rank last season: new entry
“There may have been further developments of changes in Guram Gvasalia’s career since my last update,” cautions ChatGPT when you ask it for the lowdown on Vetements’s co-founder and captain. This collection, an “anti-AI” exploration of extreme street and evening silhouettes as shaped by old-fashioned grey matter, didn’t require a show in order to reveal Gvasalia’s burning intelligence.
1: Louis Vuitton, rank last season: 2
There was so much pomp, power and pizzazz surrounding Pharrell Williams’s debut for Louis Vuitton that the collection definitely merited a second look via Vogue Runway, even for those who were fortunate enough to be there. The house’s menswear studio outdid themselves — and deservedly took a bow — in channelling Williams’s proven intuition for the creation of the catchy. It was only 10 minutes after the show that I heard someone say: “Their biggest problem now is how do you follow this?” I suspect next year’s Paris Olympics will provide some part of the answer, but in the meantime, that’s a pretty happy problem.
So what does this season’s pecking order tell us about the shifting sands of fashion fortune?
Paris dominated the list. Six of the 10 shows were on the French schedule, while The Row showed there while remaining based in New York. Prada and JW Anderson represented Milan. And Vetements, in its own universe, is understood to remain physically based in Zurich. Four out of the top ten shows were delivered by LVMH Group houses, while one — Anderson — is also partially held by the group.
The prominence of Vetements magnified the impression created by last season’s eight-placed show for Vtmnts that Guram Gvasalia is on a roll. The absence of a fully fledged collection from Gucci — and the surprise drop of Saint Laurent from the top spot last season to just outside the top 10 this season — meant that, for the first time in who knows how long, there was no Kering representation here. One suspects that will change when Saturday comes at Gucci.
This season, though, it was the pan-cultural clout of Pharrell Williams that brought unprecedented levels of attention to a menswear cycle bursting with strong — and some less strong — collections across the board. Menswear will probably always play second fiddle to womenswear on Vogue Runway, but the Spring/Summer 2024 shows certainly turned up the volume.
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