To make the understatement of the century: this year in fashion was like no other. But philosophizing about what 2020 means for “the future of fashion” is less interesting than simply looking at fashion’s weird, beautiful, chaotic present. The first two months of the year brought the normal stampede of global fashion shows, and then the world stopped—and designers with it, in some cases. The ongoing pandemic and protests of the summer gave birth to digital fashion week, a strange and dystopian experiment that nonetheless brought some joy, lots of pretension, and some pretty fantastic clothes.
It’s perhaps an impossible task to say which fashion shows were the best or most important. But because trouble is fun, I decided to rank them—admittedly this is a moronically subjective exercise, and very likely I’ve missed many people’s favorites. But in a year when the fashion industry convulsed into a funhouse mirror image of itself, looking back on these two seasons of fashion shows tells us a lot about what happened this year, what mattered, and what things might look like in a year—or, at the very least, what we might be wearing.
15. Rick Owens Fall 2020 menswear
Sometimes I think I don’t miss fashion shows—the waiting, the weird weather (it’s always weird!), the traffic, the wastefulness. But then I think about something like Rick Owens’s bombastic show in Paris last January, where two of the Migos fistbumped over a power-shoulder coat, and I sigh with nostalgia. The invitations were a heavy piece of engraved metal, which yours truly dropped on the concrete floor in the silent moment just before the show began, and everyone made fun of me for the rest of the week. It was precisely the kind of unwitting look-at-me-don’t-look-at-me performance that Owens was twistedly parodying with those huge, pleadingly boisterous shoes and shapes—and the kind of dressing-as-a-performance that I’m guessing will shape the next year in men’s style.
14. Yohji Yamamoto Fall 2020 menswear
This year, I began tracking what I coined “the Yohjissaince”—both a renewed interest in the designer’s archival work, and a fresh sense of energy from the brand and man himself. It all began with this show in January, where the designer’s oversized, fluid tailoring and mischievous sensibility struck me as almost alien in our self-serious, try-hard fashion world. It was so sophisticated, so contemplative, and done with so much intellectual integrity that I felt embarrassed thinking about anything else. This was an unusually strong collection—the ragged, painted knits and crispy but fluid gabardine suiting were some of his best pieces in years—but it also made me nostalgic for a period in fashion when you were a Yohji acolyte, or a Slimaniac, or a Raf guy, and pledged fealty to that person like a saint or a knight. That’s so appealing in an era when luxury brands are designing their logos into homogenous oblivion—and cool in a way perhaps only still available to Yamamoto.
13. Maison Margiela Artisanal Fall 2020
Nick Knight has spent the past two decades preparing himself for this very moment. An early pioneer of digitizing the sluggish fashion industry with his platform ShowStudio, Knight’s video for Maison Margiela’s Artisanal show was like his magnum opus: a postmodern hour-long freakshow about the process of making a fashion collection, triumphantly demonstrating the kind of storytelling that the video medium opens up for clothes, and indulging in the chaos of digital communication.
12. Dior Fall 2020 menswear
As Kim Jones longtime music collaborator Honey Dijon put it to GQ earlier this year, Jones’s gift is translating subculture at a mass level. His collections with street artists like Kaws and Daniel Arsham have geniusly positioned Dior as the go-to luxury label for the snarling edges of the art-collector class, but more recently, his shows have taken on a more gorgeous, personal attitude. That started with his pre-fall 2020 collection made in collaboration with streetwear godfather Shawn Stussy, but came into full flower with the Fall 2020 collection he showed in Paris in January: a celebration of the late fashion impresario Judy Blame, with berets, spiffy frock coats, suits and capes tailored with frosty panache, and recreations of Blame’s famous jewelry made of artful assemblages of junk. Blame was the kind of character who is increasingly rare in the fashion industry, and with this love letter, Jones showed his finesse in going big without selling out.
11. 4SDesigns Spring 2021
For a distinct crew of menswear aficionados, the launch of Angelo Urrutia’s 4SDesigns was the most anticipated debut of the year. After a career at Engineered Garments parent company Nepenthes, Urrutia was ready to flex his unrivaled knowledge of fashion and style—not to mention his expertise in production and development—with his own brand. His first collection was all anyone talked about between shows in Paris, though his second, which he put together remotely, was spiffy and weird, with a cool attention to fabrics. You won’t find a Chanel-ish tweed short suit, a slim drapey leather cut like a cardigan, or a muted purple silk box-pleat shirt jacket in the Garment District.
10. Collina Strada Fall 2020
It’s crazy to think that last February, Collina Strada was a brand you had to push into the spotlight. Since then, designer Hillary Taymour’s profile seems to have skyrocketed, with her effervescent ribbon masks becoming a funky microtrend, and her sustainable club kid clothes resonating with a new class of quirky-conscious consumers. (She was also one of Gucci’s guest designers for their awesome GucciFest in November.) Taymour’s bonkers digital fashion week video was one of the most unhinged things I watched this year, but I look back at her February show and see a designer putting all the pieces in place for a long career—a young creative hustling in New York who shrewdly knows that survival doesn’t require compromise.
9. Marine Serre Spring 2021
Since her first collection in 2017, Marine Serre has been a designer that the eccentrics of the fashion industry have held close to their (our!) hearts. Now, the 29-year-old Serre—petite, calm, and so chic—is something like the eye in the middle of the fashion world’s storm of overconsumption and unoriginality. It wouldn’t be overstepping to draw the craze for upcycling directly back to Serre, who has been repurposing deadstock scarves, towels, bedsheets, and other discarded materials into historically-minded garments from the beginning. Her profile grew tremendously this year, especially after Beyonce wore her moon print bodysuit in Black Is King, but Serre kept thinking and thinking, finding new ways to reduce the prices of her upcycled pieces, which now form the centerpiece of her business. The narrative film she made was a standout of the year—the kind of document that academics, critics, reporters, and the next generation of fashion fanatics will look back on to understand this year.
8. Celine Spring 2021 menswear
What if Hedi Slimane is fashion’s shock jock designer? While he played up Celine’s relaxed-stuff bourgeois origins in his first several seasons at the Paris house, this summer he released a mind-boggling collection inspired by the dancing kids of TikTok, filled with psycho prints and slacker silhouettes, including the year’s best men’s skirt. It was the year’s rare moment of unbridled joy, courtesy of a master designer submerging himself in another generation’s treasures to explain how ideas and trends are transmitted now.
7. Thom Browne Spring 2021
I can’t stop thinking about the pure sweetness of Thom Browne’s show in an empty Los Angeles stadium. It was an achingly simple delight, like a perfect, expensive pastry with a fun name. Browne, it seemed, had found a new clarity in his androgyny, with all the camp kookiness of his big Paris song and dance shows scraped away. But I kept thinking about Browne over and over this year, in the way that his collections hit on a certain discomfort in the way people think about men in fashion: when conservatives or even some pearl-clutching leftists see a man in a skirt or dress and get mad or dismissive, as if the only reason to put on clothes is to look unimpeachably okay. It’s both amusing and sad that people still react to fashion with this kind of intensity, as if looking nice, or strange, or funny is somehow immoral. Or maybe, as Browne suggests, it’s still totally thrilling.
6. Prada Fall 2020 menswear
This was a banner year for Prada—Raf Simons joined the house for an unprecedented creative partnership, and Mrs. Prada created the look of the year by pairing sweatpants and a tie in August. But to my mind, the collection Mrs. Prada showed back in January was her most powerful statement of 2020, setting an agenda that strangely prefigured the whole narrative of over-design, over-consumption, and overthinking. As brands twisted themselves into knots trying to stand for everything and say the right thing all at once this past summer, I continually thought of this collection that insisted fashion should stop trying to mean everything to everyone, and instead focus on serving its wearer.
5. Martine Rose Spring 2021 menswear
Martine Rose remains one of the few designers embraced almost exclusively by those in the know, but a slow and steady cult is building. Her Spring 2021 collection was OnlyFans-inspired and shot on a set like a video chatroom, with models lit as if by the glow of screens. It was weird, sexy, and advanced, speaking to her audience instead of trying to say too much about these times. And it was cheeky to see that the woman who brought the huge silhouette to Balenciaga is now shrinking her suits back down.
4. Fear of God Spring 2021
Has any designer undergone a transformation as radical as Jerry Lorenzo’s? Lorenzo took a few years off from putting out runway collections, putting out his spiffy-cool Essentials line and then collaborating with Zegna for a truly awesome line that seems to have put Lorenzo through fashion grad school. In August, he returned to put out the coolest mix of suiting and sweats imaginable, a vintage Armani-inspired vibe that was as sophisticated as it was relaxed.
3. Aime Leon Dore Fall 2020 lookbook campaign
This year wasn’t just about the fashion show. Some of the best fashion presentations this year were lookbooks, which have long been the lingua franca of the menswear world—whose creative pockets the rest of the industry continues to pull from. Most creative: Aime Leon Dore’s joyful video lookbook, which felt half like a Gap campaign and half like the vibe you get strolling through their immensely popular Nolita store, which is always thronged with shopper-hangers sitting on the leather sofa or sipping lattes from the store’s cafe. It was proof that you don’t need a high concept video—or even a place on the fashion show calendar—to get on everyone’s radar.
2. Balenciaga Fall 2020
Balenciaga had its wildest year yet under Demna Gvasalia: their video game was the most innovative fashion show to come out of this year’s multitude of digital experiments, and their “Sunglasses at Night” video back in October was just a riot. But to my mind, the collection they presented in Paris in March, with the first several rows of the show submerged in water, was the kind people will talk about for years to come. It managed to do what only true fashion geniuses can do: prophesize the future, and capture the indescribable mood of the world.
1. Loewe Spring 2021 menswear
There’s certainly something to be said for designers who now want to inch forward instead of racing ahead, but Jonathan Anderson seems to be like a Romantic fashion giant leaping across the hills and valleys. His clothing took on strange new spacelike proportions this year, and his interest in traditional handcraft made baskets (!) central to the fashion conversation. Ultimately, though, his show-in-a-box did the exact opposite of what everyone tried to do: rather than attempting to reach a mass audience through film, he sought to connect with a few through touch, mailing big boxes of ephemera (including a paper record player with a soundtrack!) to industry insiders to tell the story of his collections. Though he runs two fashion houses, one of which is an LVMH leather goods behemoth, his clothing felt even more handmade and absolutely from the heart and mind. What’s more, his notion of dressing up as an event in and of itself feels like the most powerful statement about where clothes are going in the coming year.
