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It takes a lot to stand out from the pack at Milan Fashion Week, but closing your runway show with the joint star power of supermodel Naomi Campbell and super-rapper Future is one surefire way to do just that. In fact, everything about Boss’ Spring/Summer 2023 collection unveiling was engineered for maximum impact, be it the fantastical setting (a zhushed-up velodrome filled with laser beams) or the casting (house ambassadors Khaby Lame, Anthony Joshua, and Alicia Schmidt, alongside veteran Australian supermodels Jordan Barrett and Adut Akech), or the delivery (the show was streamed live on TikTok with shoppable links to each of the pieces).
Boss’ major Fashion Month spectacles have become something of a norm in the last couple of years, most memorably the giant baseball-themed show from last year’s MFW, which featured a stadium full of influencers, a marching band, and a slew of supermodels including Gigi Hadid. But this season may have topped that—the front row was filled with a smattering of A-listers including Nicole Scherzinger, Patrick Schwarzenegger, Shay Mitchell, and Lee Minho, and the show was followed by a buzzy afterparty with a DJ set by Honey Dijon.
As for the fashion, Boss’ Senior Vice President of Creative Direction, Marco Falcioni, was thinking about key suiting shapes from the brand’s ’90s archive. “Our archive is the beating heart of Boss and the brand’s legacy,” he explained in a statement to press, acknowledging that campaign shots from that era populated his new season moodboard. Which is why we saw such an abundance of tailoring on the runway—oversized suiting, double-breasted suiting, three-piece suiting. Pieces were modernized with clever styling (long black dress shirts weren’t tucked in but instead hung low over suit trousers) or with great accessories, like the chunky lug-soled rubber boots, or with fresh new fabrics and deconstructed silhouettes.
There was a noted (and appreciated) effort to modernise the idea of what a suit represents at this presentation. For too long, the suit was considered the sole domain of the white, wealthy male—the embodiment of the psychopathic Wall Street ambition that characters like Patrick Batemen represent. Boss’s desire to redefine that legacy was clear, not only in the sleek new cuts, but in the casting. It wasn’t only size, age, race, and gender inclusive, it also included activists like the Italian Paralympian Veronica Yoko Plebani and the deaf trans artist Chella Man. This new army of Boss faces—led by the forever fabulous Naomi Campbell—is the exact kind of casting we love to see from fashion brands on the runway. That the clothes were so great only proves that you can never have enough of a good thing.
