“Something savage, something primitive, something human,” said Miuccia Prada backstage at her autumn/winter men’s show in Milan, her Mona Lisa smile as enigmatic as ever as she dropped cryptic hints as to the thinking behind her new collection, designed in collaboration with Belgian designer Raf Simons. With Mrs Prada, as she’s reverentially known, the point of reference is never obvious.

On Sunday, the third day of Men’s Fashion Week 2025, the catwalk featured “masculine” tropes – both in the clothes on show and in the construction-site of a set, which was made up of different levels of scaffolding. So we got rugged, weighty shearlings, ragged and unpolished, primitively patched together, chunks of leather roughly hewn into jackets, and trousers in contrasting patchwork.

Alongside this were references to Westerns; cowboy boots with spurs, fringing, rodeo tropes on jackets. John Wayne costumery it wasn’t, however; the proportions were lean-as-you-like and the boys on the catwalk unlikely to fare well in an OK Corral gun fight. 

The timing – 24 hours before Donald Trump’s inauguration – was surely no coincidence and Mrs Prada said that, naturally, world events play on her mind when she’s designing. “Yes, it’s a response to what is happening,” she said. “The feeling of resistance, passion, revolution. We have to be optimistic.”