The models at the spring 2025 men’s Prada presentation last June walked down a winding runway, but the show was actually about a different kind of happy trail: Mrs. Prada and Raf Simons cut their trousers extra low and paired them with cropped, tight sweaters and shirts buttoned haphazardly, as if to make them lift above the waist, exposing the navel. One of the looks from that show was worn by Troye Sivan this weekend at the LACMA Art+ Film Gala in Los Angeles. The more he danced on stage with Charli XCX, his Sweat Tour co-conspirator, the more his shirt rose. Sweat is right.
Prada and Simons weren’t alone with this tantalizing men’s proposal. When Paul Mescal turned up at the Gucci men’s show in Milan in tiny boxer shorts and a loose button-down that revealed his own Gladiator II body-as-armor, he effectively christened the midriff the key erogenous zone of the season. Later, Jonathan Anderson cropped his button-downs at Loewe, and Eli Russel Linnetz at ERL, Walter Van Beirendonck, Charles Jeffrey, and EgonLab, did the same with their jackets, tank tops, and tees. Dries Van Noten was more romantic than gratuitous with his exposure of the abdomen, veiling it with diaphanous pastel fabrics at his farewell show.
Scroll to see the midriff take over at the spring 2025 menswear collections.
And then came Demna in September, with jeans slung so low it was less about happy trails, than it was about the final destination. That almost all of his male models were otherwise entirely covered up with long-sleeved jackets and sweatshirts, their faces covered with sunglasses so big they rendered even the most famous faces in the cast anonymous, underscored the designer’s point: Look over here. “My aesthetic is not based on that kind of very direct sex appeal or that kind of fragility,” said Demna of the trompe l’oeil lingerie bodysuits that opened his show, yet when it came to the menswear the appetite for sex was rather straightforward.
At New York’s spring 2025 show, the Mexican designer Patricio Campillo, who was making his stateside debut, and Eckhaus Latta gave this nether region further consideration, revealing it with tops that swung open either at the sides or the back. In Paris, Duran Lantink took things further south by outfitting his models with classic briefs revealed by skirts worn so low they made the pelvis the main focus. The look was reminiscent of Thom Browne’s spring 2023 jockstraps: “I wanted it to be obnoxiously low-hanging. I thought seeing that part of the body, the front, was a lot more interesting than seeing the butt crack [laughs],” Browne said of that show. “I mean, is the butt crack really interesting? I thought the front part looked a lot more interesting.”
Browne et al have the right idea with their perverse games of sex appeal. Much attention has been paid of late to the upper thigh as the apex of male eroticism. What really makes short-shorts alluring is that they reveal a lot without giving it all away. It’s the same tormentous idea of sexuality that makes the lower abdomen such an exciting proposition: How much can I show without showing all of that?
The big question is what comes next: more revelation (Rick Owens, fall 2015, anyone?) or a swing of the pendulum towards the prim and prudish? But for the moment, let’s enjoy the fact that men’s designers are finally finding the courage to have some fun while embracing the matter of the male-on-male gaze. Until we find out what’s down the pipeline, I leave you with Owens’s words then: “Let’s not forget a bit of cheerful depravity.”