Shuttled just over half a mile along the Seine from a pontoon just outside the Musée d’Orsay to the bridge, Paris’s oldest, we ascended those historic stone steps to find its cobbled roadway entirely clad with the ‘damier’ check that decorates its monogrammed handbags. A glass of champagne was popped into our hands, French accordion music trilled gently in the background and, as the sun set – the sky so perfectly orange you wondered if it was possible that it, too, had been arranged – you saw, from every window and balcony, groups of people straining for a glimpse of perhaps the most high-profile runway show of the century so far. They were not the only ones. Online, across Louis Vuitton’s various platforms and in the ensuing avalanche of social media posts, the show drew a billion views, with no doubt millions more encountering it in the days that followed. On Valentine’s Day in 2023, the multi-hyphenate American recording artist and producer was named as the successor to the late Virgil Abloh as the house’s menswear artistic director, and everything about his debut show announced a new and spectacular era for menswear.

Williams was also no doubt the reason for the stacked guest list, which numbered musicians (Beyoncé, Rihanna, A$AP Rocky), film stars (Zendaya, Riz Ahmed, John Boyega), sportspeople (Lewis Hamilton, Marcus Rashford) and panoply of international models and influencers. You imagined that, temporarily, Hollywood had been shaken up and emptied out. Afterwards, Williams took to the stage and performed with Jay-Z.

Of the show itself – which lasts in my mind as a dizzying blur – I remember the miniature Louis Vuitton-branded trucks whirring down the runway (their cargo: piles of the house’s trunks), the swell of the orchestra and the flare of the lights, the way that the seats reverberated at the show’s climax and a song by gospel choir Voices of Fire (a new production by Williams so catchy that I watched Beyoncé mouth its words across the runway mid-song). Afterwards, a group of us slumped in a nearby bar, overwhelmed, our phones dead. It was impossible not to be enlivened by the sheer spectacle: the clothes could be seen and assessed tomorrow. And in some ways, that felt like the point: when he hired Williams, Pietro Beccari, Louis Vuitton’s chairman and CEO, said he wanted to create “something that went beyond just pure design”. He got what he desired. It was a show that burnt bright and fast like a supernova. Paris was momentarily paused, and no doubt the show’s impact went far beyond those interested in luxury fashion.

That potentially the most-watched fashion show of all time was menswear feels like an anomaly. Menswear fashion month has, particularly in recent years, been viewed as something of a beleaguered younger brother to its womenswear counterpart, discussed in the industry’s gossipy inner circles as if it’s permanently on the point of collapse. Schedules are shortening, they say, menswear designers are leaving the week for the womenswear schedule, or indeed abandoning fashion weeks entirely, while the travelling men’s press corps gets smaller each season. It’s in some ways true, and there have been plenty of casualties (case in point, London’s dedicated menswear week has been scrapped in January and is now only a small co-ed happening in June). Yet it does continue to roll onwards. And this season – perhaps buoyed by the promise of Williams’s starry debut – designers, houses and brands in Paris, Milan and at Pitti Uomo in Florence slapped on the proverbial greasepaint and, amid a hot, sweaty European summer, put on a show.

Traditionally, men’s fashion has not been dictated by the runway, but the street. If the precursor to the fashion show for women was happening all the way back in the 1860s – initially as salon-style presentations in Parisian ateliers or British stately homes and residences, before the inaugural ‘press week’ in the 1940s – the first menswear presentation was not held until 1952 in Florence by Italian tailoring house Brioni. Even though a dedicated menswear fashion week was established by the 1970s, men tended not to follow the whims of the runway that women were subjected to (constant decrees on the shortness of a hem, the depth of a neckline, et cetera, repeated ad nauseam in magazines and later on television), but instead largely took their cue from popular culture more widely, particularly from music and underground culture. Even when I was growing up in the 2000s, menswear trends disseminated from the runway, like the skinny jeans brought back into style by Hedi Slimane during his highly lauded tenure at Dior, were largely only encountered when they were worn by musicians. This is not to say that men’s runway shows were not influential (Slimane certainly defined the pin-thin silhouette of the era, which had teenage me trailing around a local shopping centre for a pair of white skinny jeans). It’s just that the trends were filtered through to men via culture: I wanted to wear them because I’d seen them on The Libertines, The Strokes and The Klaxons.

Fashion now – and by this, I do not simply mean clothes, but the industry as a larger cultural entity – is unavoidable, for men as well as women. Runway shows, and their celebrity-stacked front rows, flood social media, even being directed to those with an algorithm barely tuned to pop culture. If your interest is somewhere else – sport, film, music, cars – such is the cross-contamination between its players that almost all content is attuned to consuming fashion in some way (a male movie star dressed up on the red carpet; colourfully outfitted footballers arriving at stadiums pre-match; Harry Styles bejewelled in paillettes and feathers). Off Instagram, for the interested, there are numerous other ways to engage: YouTube explainers, podcasts, TikToks, Reddit forums and niche Discord chats. No longer do teenage boys interested in fashion have to make pilgrimages to magazine shops in big cities to help them decide what to wear: all they have to do is open their phones.

And that, in turn, is influencing the fashion calendar. Valentino hosted its first dedicated menswear show in Milan for some time this season (usually the collection is shown alongside Piccioli’s womenswear), while Gucci’s new creative director Sabato De Sarno has done away with his forebear Alessandro Michele’s fluid, co-ed approach, choosing instead to show his men’s and womenswear separately. Other brands are channelling their efforts into a slew of new male ambassadors, drafting them to wear their clothing on the social-media prescient red carpet. It is a canny move, one which allows brands to capitalise on limited attention spans with two more shows a year, no doubt equally star-studded and just as worthy of column inches. And the sales appear to be matching the trend. According to Statista, the value of the menswear market is forecast to reach £450 billion in 2024. Little wonder that brands want to make certain their menswear shows capture the timeline.

Spectacle comes in different forms, though, and there is little like the excitement and anticipation of a Prada show. For those who attend, we engage in a particular ritual: in the hour or so before it starts, we gather in Bar Luce, the Wes Anderson-designed café in Fondazione Prada, where the show is held. In the busy rush for its perfectly square sandwiches or sugary slices of pan di spagna (sponge cake), cloaked in pink icing and marzipan, amid the trompe-l’oeil interior –evoking historic Milanese watering holes – it provides a primer on Miuccia Prada’s understanding of how world-building operates (she shares this task with the equally astute Raf Simons). From there, we troop through to the Fondazione’s Deposito space, a vast hall transformed season on season into the house’s sometimes austere, sometimes playful, yet always transporting, runway sets.These sets, created alongside long-time collaborator Rem Koolhaas, tend to be the same for the men’s and women’s shows, with some minor alterations (by a quirk of the fashion calendar, it is menswear that comes first, in some ways setting the mood of the season ahead).

This season, there was a stainless steel, gridded floor, recalling at once a gleaming contemporary factory or the inner workings of a spacecraft. As the show began, dripping curtains of green slime descended from the ceiling, pooling on the floor in toppling acidic mounds. Prada called them “abstract walls” or “fluid interruptions”, which saw them attempt to cut garments, whether tailoring, outerwear or denim, with the same lightness and fluidity of a white shirt (though unexpected flourishes came in the adornments, from prints of Alien-like xenomorphs to tassels, faux fur and origami flowers). As a spectacle, it was unexpected, slippery, fascinating and beautiful. After the show, attendees couldn’t resist placing their fingers into the streams of dripping goo, finding it was not fluid, as it appeared, but hardened and sticky to the touch. That is the unique joy of a Prada show: nothing is what it seems. It translated outside the room, too; after Louis Vuitton and Vetements, it was the third most-viewed collection of the season on Vogue Runway.

Other menswear shows invited the world into places never seen. Such was the case at Fendi, showing as the season’s guest designer at Florence’s historic menswear fair Pitti Uomo. Menswear artistic director Silvia Venturini Fendi chose the house’s newly opened factory just outside the city as the place for this one-time show; in the sweltering haze of the June afternoon, guests were shuttled into the Tuscan countryside in a motorcade. Amid gleaming glass-walled workshops, guests mingled with the craftspeople who were mid-shift, each working on elements of the house’s leather goods and handbags.They continued as the men’s collection wove its way across the factory floor, which Venturini Fendi called “the pulsing heart of Fendi, a place symbolic of creation”. Afterwards, we were invited up onto the roof, a bucolic garden planted with local flora which melted seamlessly into the hilled landscape. Enormous plates of bread and cheese were served under the setting sun. The craftspeople giggled as they took selfies with Alexander Skarsgård and danced away long into the summer night.

Sometimes, though, spectacle needs nothing but clothes. This has always been the philosophy of Rei Kawakubo, who calls herself a ‘clothes maker’. It is a statement no doubt laced with irony: her runway collections for Comme des Garçons, particularly those for women, are purposely unwieldy, less garment than shape, defined by protrusions of fabric and strange embellishments. She understands that what is presented on the runway cannot be ordinary, and in her evocation of a strange, near-pagan beauty she creates a spectacle all her own. This season, her menswear collection for CDG Homme Plus – shown in a stark concrete space, no dramatics needed – evoked theatre curtains in trompe-l’oeil prints and tailoring held open at the back. Quite what she meant by this, we will likely never know: was it a suggestion that clothing should be a performance all of its own? Or that fashion is now simply an empty spectacle, an open stage with nothing beyond? She simply stated that “in order to find a new world we have to go beyond reality”. Rick Owens’s menswear show, which took place under enormous puffs of coloured smoke on the forecourt of Paris’ Palais de Tokyo, felt like an attempt to capture a similar mood. He talked about the need for joy, through clothes, in a crumbling world. For the finale, his black-clad figures – elevated on enormous stilt-like platforms – stalked through the fog, marching to a brave new world.

There was a time, of course, when runway shows were not filmed, and hardly photographed. I love looking at old images on @archivings.stacks, an Instagram account run by Montreal-based fashion enthusiast Shahan Assadourian, which collates pre-2000s imagery from long-out-of-print magazines. In photographs you see the static audiences watching on with what seems like a now-strange politeness, hands in laps, enraptured, some writing in notebooks, the rare one with a camera. I wonder if some contemporary designers will look to go back there to eschew social-media theatrics, to hold shows where phones are confiscated at the front door.

Because there has always been a spectacle in fashion – a desire for visual impact – even when the eyes of the world were hardly watching. Writing about the men’s and womenswear shows, I have been struck by the feeling that Margiela continues to remain such a prescient force, both in the way collections are conceived and shown (his early lookbooks could be lifted, without alteration, onto the runway today). He rose to fame in the ’90s, his clothing a riposte to the sheer excess of the’80s. Now firmly installed in fashion lore, he and Jenny Meirens – his right hand, with whom he ran Maison Martin Margiela – hosted the SS90 show in a dilapidated neighbourhood on the outskirts of Paris. Set amid a derelict playpark, local kids, invited with their families, watched on, some running alongside the models, even climbing on their shoulders, as Margiela’s otherworldly women stumbled across the runway, hair wild, clothing askew. “As a student, I always thought that fashion was a bit superficial, all glitz and glamour, but this show changed everything for me,” said Raf Simons. “I walked out of it and thought: that’s what I’m going to do.”

In the photographs, you can see visible gasps spreading across attendees’ faces; others are ecstatic, laughing and smiling as they crouch in clusters (no seating plan). The joy is palpable There have, of course, been shows to elicit strong emotions in recent years; I think particularly of Demna’s time at Vetements, his first show taking place at a Paris sex club, others at churches and department stores evoking similar feelings that we were witnessing the way we dress changing before our eyes (unsurprisingly, he was a Margiela design team alumni). But who will be the next to shift the fashion show paradigm? Maybe it will be a menswear designer. Hopefully, they will come from the underground. Because even among the seductive technicolour theatrics of the fashion blockbuster, there is – and will always be – a place for the arthouse.

Taken from Issue 59 of 10 Men UK – PRECISION, CRAFT, LUXURY – is out NOW.

@jackbenjaminmoss