identity on the runway

exploring modern masculinity

Jan 27, 2026

Hello darling,

Have you been enjoying the runway shows thus far this season?

Prada, and Rowen Rose in Milan.
Dior, EGONLAB, Songzio, Amiri, Willy Chavarria, Hermès, and KidSuper in Paris.

As I was admiring and dissecting some of my favourite men’s autumn/winter collections, I came across a theme in fashion’s exploration of male identity this season.

What structures are available for male identity now — and which are missing?
What happens to masculinity when the old structures no longer stabilise identity and nothing clear replaces them?

My thoughts began with Dior’s Winter 2026-2027 show.

Jonathan Anderson is a realm of questions that are brilliant at destabilising norms and feels deliberately mid-thought.
The collection looks like someone in a taste-in-formation phase, enjoying the eccentric.
The show doesn’t arrive anywhere, it just wanders. We drift through moods.

The chosen runway music adds to this. A loop:
“Alesis” by Mk.gee turns into “Axial Seamount” by Tortoise, then “ROCKMAN” by Mk.gee, and then “Severn Beach” by Ekoplekz, before we end right back at “Alesis”.
What do these songs have in common?
Emotion before language. Movement without destination. We are inside a state. The space between feeling and articulation.
A nod to our world of internalised emotion by people who feel deeply but express obliquely from a lack of confidence and coherence.
(Hah. Are we all culturally avoidants? Or do we just live in a world that rewards avoidant behaviour? But this is an aside.)

It’s important to note that Mk.gee himself was an inspiration for Anderson.
His influence is seen in the voluminous puffer jacket and skinny jeans silhouette.

(Left) Mk.gee, (Right) Image courtesy: WWD

We also see the Withnail and I film reference
in long coats that function as borrowed gravitas.

Withnail and I isn’t just cult British style, but about arrested becoming.
People who understand the world, but cannot enter it — drifting between class aspiration and collapse, using irony as armour, and performance as survival.
Sound familiar?
This adds to the tone.

(Left) Withnail and I, (Right) Image courtesy: WWD

Then, the life of Paul Poiret brings this altogether.
Through fashion, Poiret’s brilliance destabilised norms before there was a system ready to hold it.
He also unfortunately lacked financial discipline, institutional anchoring, and strategic adaptability.
He burned brightly and then the world moved faster than he could stabilise himself inside it.
Arrested becoming, yet again.

Image courtesy: Inside The Mood, Leaf Greener

Altogether, I believe this collection mirrors where we stand in relation to our world today.
Class is unstable, cultural authority is fragmented, and we no longer want to play by the rules we inherited, but we don’t exactly know who we are yet.
Our collective identity is in mid-formation. (And maybe that’s okay?)

Noting that this is a men’s collection, it also led me to contemplate the following ~

Masculine identity scripts have been collapsing for some time now as a healthy part of modernisation and necessary structural rebalancing.
For much of the twentieth century, masculinity was stabilised by a limited set of external structures: providerhood, authority, emotional restraint, and clearly gendered labour.
These roles were not benign (often upheld through exclusion and domination), but they were legible. It gave most men a set identity in relation to the world.
As the world moved toward the dismantling of patriarchal norms, those structures lost their legitimacy.

The loss of promised stability is not only symbolic; it is practical.
When dignity was once conferred through work, provision, or endurance, and those avenues narrow or disappear, the invitation to “reimagine masculinity” can feel less like possibility and more like displacement without support.

Non-male populations have spent decades articulating new frameworks for identity, agency, and solidarity.
Masculinity has not yet developed equally coherent replacements.
A structural imbalance shaped by economics and historically uneven access to stability.

Psychologically, identity diffusion means a stage of suspension.
I believe what we are witnessing today is the masculine in transition.
And transition periods are rarely elegant.

In the attempt to stabilise identity externally while internal coherence is still pending, we’ve seen rehearsed aesthetics, borrowed symbols of strength, irony-as-distance, and hyper-curated personas.
I’m sure you’ve seen those “male starter pack” memes.

Image courtesy: The Seasonless, Support Women DJs, Under25 Dictionary

And as you know, this vacuum has also given rise to manosphere content — the ecosystem that reframes structural uncertainty as personal grievance, and feminist progress as personal loss.
Rather than offering new models of masculinity, it resurrects old hierarchies under the guise of “truth,” “logic,” or “biological realism,” positioning women as antagonists instead of collaborators in a changing world.
What makes this seductive to people is not its ideology, but its “clarity”.
Under prolonged uncertainty, the human nervous system seeks relief through simplification.
Manosphere content offers simple answers, rigid roles, and someone to blame — all the things transitional periods struggle to provide.

I actually think about this a lot because of my younger brothers.
As they’ve grown, we’ve had many conversations around identity and behaviour confusion, dating scripts, and individual fulfilment in society today.
But there are times when they ask for advice and I don’t know how to help them.
My degrees, ongoing cultural research, and life experience help me explain the world to them, but we can’t always come up with a solution.
Even more, I can’t protect them from influence and pain.

I think fashion historian and theorist Rian Phin summarised this experience well during her Dsquared2 runway analyses.

[thoughts on men’s milan fashion week; Start 11:24]
“...men broadening their ability to have individual thinking outside of patriarchy. They victimise themselves because of the manosphere content in a way that is, again, not productive. It’s very alienating for them. And I don’t want men to have to live like that. I want men to be free from the confines of patriarchy.”
“…men are not enjoying the manosphere thing. They are listening to this manosphere content and getting riled up and having all this rage content and engaging the world and other people in this way that is so enraged and hostile and negative — and they’re miserable.”
“I’m just mad that this is the state that we’re in when it’s not pleasing to anybody. If this were making men happy and they were fulfilled… but we have male loneliness statistics that prove that they’re not happy doing this. Like the manosphere content, is again, just a grift. Nobody making that content cares about young men or men’s mental health at all.”

That said, by naming this male disorientation, we are not trying to centre it above all else. There simply must be an awareness that ignoring this side has consequences for everyone.

So, is there a solution to all of this?

Aside from awareness, there were a few ideas given on the runway ~

Prada’s Fall/Winter 2026 provides a proposal regarding epistemic collapse.
Right now, it seems like the world is operating in fantasy — truth being optional, history rewritten or denied, identity built through algorithms, and a stagnation in faking coherence instead of actually earning it.
Prada insists on staying in contact with reality.
In their collection, we see things like dirt on the sleeves and silhouettes that are not abstracted away from the body, but conscious of the human inside, attentive to posture, and aware of attitude. There is no erasure of history or of self.
The balance between masculine and feminine also remains clear, treated as co-presence.

Then, EGONLAB’s “Lazarus” collection does not attempt a rebuild through dominance. It shows rebirth as care.
The collection insists on rising with softness not as aesthetic affect, but as ethical position.
A refusal of emotional repression.
A refusal to let crisis harden masculinity into emotional austerity, defensive detachment, armoured selfhood, and status-oriented control.

However, I don’t think anyone anywhere has a full solution.
Identity crises are never solved by ideology alone.
Historically, they stabilise only when three layers realign at once:

material reality (work, class, livelihood)
social bonds (belonging, mentorship, intimacy)
meaning structures (narratives that make suffering intelligible)

Fashion, at its best, intervenes in layer 3 and sometimes hints at layer 2, but it cannot touch layer 1. Though, did you really think I was proposing we leave it to fashion to solve this for us?
Art can only bring awareness and commentary. We must figure out the rest.

Overall, I think any “solution” that can be neatly summarised would be dishonest.
And to say that this is a disorienting time is an understatement.

But not knowing who we are yet in gender scripts, generational scripts, and location scripts is not the same as having no future.
Identity is being rebuilt more slowly these days, and hopefully that just means more consciously than before.

I’m curious to know your thoughts on this, darling.

With love,

Solène

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Written from Los Angeles, California, USA.
A little escape from the winter storms on the east.