Street Style Rewind—What Stylish Guys (and Gals) Were Wearing to the Spring 2017 Menswear Shows
Ten years ago in street style—what’s changed and what remains the same.
Reported by Vogue.
Ten years in fashion is a geological era. According to Vogue, street style from the spring 2017 menswear circuit — shot across four fashion capitals plus Pitti Uomini in Florence — reads like a dispatch from a genuinely different industry. The silhouettes were sharper, the show calendar was busier, and the creative directors helming the biggest houses were, in many cases, entirely different people.
The losses and departures hit differently in retrospect. Virgil Abloh was very much alive and present, and his absence from the current landscape is still felt. Alessandro Michele was deep in his maximalist Gucci era in Milan — a chapter that has since closed, with Michele now at Valentino in Rome. Matthew Foley was channeling Milanese sprezzatura; today he's committed to Thom Browne's gray flannel precision, though the bleached blond hair remains a constant.
What the Archive Gets Right
Not everything has shifted. Yu Masui and Takeji Hirakawa are still out here doing exactly what they do, decade after decade. Street style photographers Phil Oh and Acielle Tanbetova are still the ones capturing the off-runway action — some institutions are simply load-bearing. And menswear's relationship with tailoring? It loosened considerably over the intervening years, though the pendulum may be swinging back toward structure.
What the archive also reveals is how much the infrastructure of menswear itself has contracted. Back in 2017, dedicated menswear weeks ran across London, Milan, Paris, and New York, with Florence's Pitti anchoring the whole season. Now, only Milan, Paris, and Pitti maintain standalone men's calendars — the rest has been absorbed into co-ed schedules, efficiency dressed up as evolution.
Scrolling through decade-old street style is less nostalgia trip, more diagnostic tool — a way to clock exactly what the industry optimized away, what it held onto, and what it quietly let rot. The good stuff still looks good. The rest is a lesson.
Read the original at Vogue.
