Cowboy hats come off. There’s a new king of menswear this season: a designer who’s never reached the top fashion showList of top rated menswear shows. Even more extraordinary is that the designer is not a contracted creative director, but the self-made founder of his own brand. Perhaps the most special thing? The designer is 86 years old.
Ralph Lauren has long preferred menswear shows to catwalks. As he once told Style.com’s Dirk Standen: “In menswear, I don’t do one show – I do the whole show. If you really want to understand my style, you really look at my clothes.” That’s why his last men’s show was in 2005, and the previous one in 2002, and it’s hard to find evidence of any other Ralph Lauren men’s shows dating back to the company’s founding in 1967.
This season, however, Lauren decided to acknowledge the “rolling thunder” cultural momentum his brand currently enjoys by combining the twin pillars of polo and purple in one show. I hope everyone’s reaction fashion showWhen he considered whether to stick with the format, readership played a small role in his thinking. We can always come back and review.
Lauren’s rise is the biggest shift in the top ten, along with a few other notable changes. Three of the season’s four shows are on the Milan calendar, meaning that for the first time ever there’s a 50-50 split between shows on the Italian and French menswear calendars. However, if Yves Saint Laurent hadn’t chosen to show its menswear at a couture show, it would almost certainly be on this list. But then it would slip into No. 11, where another French label would break into the top ten for the first time, Ryota Iwai’s Auralee. Other new entrants include DSquared2, which features hot celebrities, and Dolce & Gabbana, which sparked heated controversy over its model casting. These brands from Milan beat Hermès (where Véronique Nichanian showed her last collection after 37 years) and dropped to seventh place.
Here is the complete list.












