Vogue's five-minute Fashion Month debrief: Milan SS25 edition

I graduated in 2016 wearing a pair of knock-off Prada brogues with super-thick soles sandwiched between layers of jute and colourful foam. Never did I think I would be writing about the real things – or at least a redux of the spring/summer 2011 originals – from a windowless office cubicle in London as I watched Milan Fashion Week unfold on my newsfeed.

I guess a sense of arrested development also motivated Miuccia Prada and Raf Simons this season. “It seems that we are directed by algorithms,” Mrs Prada was reported to have said in a backstage scrum. “So anything we like and anything we know is because other people are instilling it into us.” Each model’s entrance felt like a new swipe on the TikTok slot machine: windbreakers worn over couture-ish feather dresses with bucket hat visors; bikini bralettes worn with harnessed skirts; trompe l’oeil fur coats worn with reflective miniskirts bearing painted vistas. That there was no perceptible through-line was the point. “We wanted a show where every individual was their own individual,” Simons added. It was the best of the Milan collections, and a perhaps timely riposte to the flattening effect of experiencing life online.

Related: Rave Review brings an upcycled Swedish simplicity to Milan Fashion Week

If Prada’s collection managed to transport me back to a time when I used to shop at Aldo, then I can only imagine how the industry’s more senior editors felt sitting on all those animal bean bag chairs at Bottega Veneta. “I was interested in the wonder you have as a kid when you try something for the first time,” Matthieu Blazy said of the inspiration behind his spring collection. “It’s almost like primal fashion. Your first experience of fashion when you try on your parents’ clothes.”

The designer presented comically outsized jackets and one-legged trousers under wrap skirts, with party dresses that had been folded down around the waist. A large portion of the fabrics had been pre-wrinkled to evoke a child’s naïve experiments in dress-up, while more fantastical fabrications – including pom-pom headpieces and shirred leather bathrobes – could have come from that same child’s imagination. Blazy’s infantile charms were rivalled by Francesco Risso. The Marni frontman decorated his models with sailor boy caps and cartoonish eyebrows for a collection crafted only from cotton: cropped chemises worn like capelets, too-big tuxedos worn over siren skirts, bouffant gowns with cut-out rose appliqués.

And what was with all the alien-eyed sunglasses this season? (Marni, Prada, JW Anderson, Avavav… to say nothing of Diesel’s extra-terrestrial contact lenses that bled out far beyond the pupils.) Perhaps Moschino’s directive – to “Get Happy”, as one T-shirt dress read in blown-up capital letters – was a sentiment shared. “Fashion sometimes wants to give a very intellectual message,” said Donatella Versace of her own spring collection. “But we need to be positive with all that’s going on in the world.” The designer pulled from her former diffusion line Versus’s spring/summer 1997 collection and showed zig-zag patterned knits and floral prints on silk and chainmail. “There was freedom, happiness,” she said of designing in the ’90s. “Not too much thinking!”

Related: Mona Tougaard handled her runway tumble like a Boss in Milan

Max Mara’s collection did celebrate the mind. It was inspired by the fourth-century mathematician and philosopher Hypatia and comprised long and lean tailored silhouettes, all in an academic palette of browns and tans that was echoed at Philosophy, where, in Lorenzo Serafini’s hands, the shades felt a little more serene than stern. “Peaceful escapism,” as he described it. Philosophy’s barefoot-in-the-grass motto was mirrored also in Alberta Ferretti’s wispy chiffon dresses.

Fashion has always drawn from the past, but you wonder how many of today’s designers feel uninspired by the present. Dolce & Gabbana’s spring collection was plunged in the amber of a 1990s Madonna – featuring bullet bras bursting from balconette dresses and satin tuxedos and tubinos – with the Queen of Pop herself situated front row in a black veil. Maximilian Davis of Ferragamo, meanwhile, took the 1950s dancer Katherine Dunham as his starting point. His leggings, leotards and ribboned pumps were worn with double wrapped tops in the style of ballet cardigans. Sabato de Sarno found a historic muse of his own in the erstwhile Gucci client Jackie Onassis, whose jet-setting spirit was conjured in printed seaside separates, archival headscarves and a woven raffia coat in fluoro green. “I love the past,” he said. “Going to the archives in Florence is one of my best days in the creative process.” Kim Jones had 100 years to pluck from for the first womenswear season of Fendi’s centennial: spanning from the drop-waist dresses of the 1920s to the commercial nirvana of the 1990s and all of its Baguette bags. Time, I think, to rediscover those not-quite-Prada brogues of my own past.

Related: Step backstage at the Milan SS25 shows