Why I’m sitting out an international fashion season – and why sometimes stepping away is how you keep creating.
The SS27 menswear season began in Milan in June. Within a few hours of arriving in the city, I was back into the familiar rhythm of fashion week: checking the schedule, moving around the city via metro or Lime, seeing collections, taking pictures for socials and rushing from one event to the next. There is something addictive about it. For a few days, the entire industry seems to exist in the same physical space, and you move through it with everyone else.
Travelling between multiple countries in a fashion season means a lot of the preparation goes into the logistics of simply getting there. Working out which shows you can make and how you’re going to trek across the city in fashionably impractical shoes requires a strict schedule.
There is usually one event on the calendar that allows you to land, settle in and recognise that the season has actually started. This time, it was an open-air event by On, the Swiss athletic brand, set in a Milanese courtyard. Techno played through the space, smoke rose between the old buildings, and familiar faces began to appear alongside people I was meeting for the first time.
The Comme des Garçons Homme Plus SS27 runway had a similar effect on me. Silhouettes that challenged expectations, ideas that felt instinctively joyful rather than purely functional. At the Dries Van Noten SS27 menswear show, the colours, layering and prints, were framed so precisely by a beautiful show space. For a few minutes, you forget everything happening outside of the runway. Even after days of rushing between appointments, fashion could still make me stop.
Of course, the collections are the reason I’m there, but fashion week has become an entity in its own right. The people, the fleeting conversations, the constant movement, the feeling that something is always happening somewhere else. You can spend the afternoon at a show, rush across the city for the next one, run into someone you haven’t seen in months, and suddenly find yourself consumed by the calendar.
There are also moments when it feels completely ridiculous. During the SS27 menswear season, both Paris and Milan experienced extreme heat. In Paris, temperatures reached 40.9°C, making it difficult to move through a schedule of shows and appointments. The Eiffel Tower and the Louvre both closed early to visitors as temperatures became increasingly difficult to manage.
At one point after a long day, I locked myself out of my accommodation and ended up with a €495 locksmith bill. The locksmith finally got me back in at 1am, at which point I discovered water pouring from the boiler. An emergency plumber arrived and didn’t leave until 6am. I somehow still made it to an 8am breakfast appointment.
My friends have started joking that my fashion weeks are cursed. There always seems to be some new drama waiting for me, from accommodation disasters to getting robbed after an afterparty in Milan.
That is one of the strange things about fashion week. You learn to manage yourself. You work out your route, carry what you need, find food when you can, deal with the heat, the waiting and the lack of sleep, and keep moving. We all complain about how demanding the calendar can be, but are we going to stop? Of course not.
There is a strange status economy attached to fashion week. The industry rewards a constant presence. Being seen becomes evidence of involvement and belonging, and being everywhere can begin to look like professional relevance.
Despite everything, June was probably the most exciting international season I had experienced so far. I covered some incredible shows and came away feeling that something in my career was beginning to shift. I didn’t come home thinking I wanted to stop going but instead came home wondering how I could keep going without losing the part of the job I cared about most. There is a particular irony in working in a creative industry: you can spend weeks surrounded by incredible creativity and still return home creatively depleted. Perhaps that is the cost of continuity.
Although I love the lifestyle, I have to remind myself why I started this career in the first place: to create, to explore my thoughts, and to make space for something new. We travel across countries to see more, yet the more we see, the less time we have to process any of it. So, for this season, I decided to stay in London. There is something appealing about having one city to navigate. I can take my time between shows. I can go home for a break. I can work. I can sit with a collection instead of immediately thinking about the next appointment, the next flight, the next city.
If anything, I want to pay closer attention. I want to know what I’m looking at. To sit with a collection for longer than a few minutes between shows. To study the references, understand the ideas behind it, look again at the garment construction and work out what actually stayed with me. That is what I wanted to explore this season. For me, the question has become less about where I should be, and more about what I want to create.
