For one week each season, Milan seems to operate at a different speed. Cars idle outside historic buildings, editors move between shows with military precision and restaurant tables fill with people dissecting collections long after the final model has left the runway. Fashion may be the reason everyone arrives, but the week quickly becomes a much wider portrait of the city itself, revealing how closely Milan’s sense of style is connected to its food, design, hospitality and social rituals.
For spring/summer 2027, my base was Speronari Suites, just a few steps from the Duomo. Location matters at the best of times in Milan, but during Fashion Week it becomes almost strategic, when a journey that looks simple on a map can suddenly involve traffic, schedule changes and a race against a show’s closing doors. Being able to walk out of the hotel and immediately find myself in the center of the city made a noticeable difference, particularly on days when every hour was already spoken for.
Speronari also houses El Porteño Gourmet, an Argentine restaurant that became especially appealing at the end of long days when the prospect of crossing Milan once again was considerably less attractive than heading downstairs for dinner and having a place I could have people join me for dinner meetings, where the staff quickly learned my favorite table and my drink order by heart. That kind of convenience can sound almost mundane until Fashion Week begins, when the distance between a hotel room and a good meal suddenly feels like a luxury in itself.
The week, of course, is made up of far more than runway shows. Before the first call time comes the preparation, and beauty appointments become part of the wider choreography of the schedule. I had my lashes done at LashDream and my insanely sparkly nails, a topic of much discussion on the front row of several fashion shows, at Manifest 13, both squeezed into an itinerary that already seemed to be competing for every available hour. There is something slightly contradictory about the experience: the whole point is to sit still, yet your mind is usually racing ahead to the next appointment, the next outfit change and whether there is enough time to cross the city before the doors close.
Then there was the less conventional question of what to do with a puppy. I had brought my cavapoo, Lola, with me to Milan since we were heading back to London from the Amalfi Coast, which was perfectly manageable until the schedule began to involve back-to-back shows and presentations in different parts of the city. DOGO Milano became the solution. On the busiest days, Lola spent the day there while I moved between venues, which meant she had a rather more sociable Fashion Week than I did and I could concentrate on getting from one appointment to the next without attempting to introduce a small dog to the front row, particularly given her recent penchant for barking madly at anyone wearing a hat.
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From the runway to dinner
The shows themselves are a reminder of how broad Milan Fashion Week has become. Simon Cracker brought an irreverent, unconventional energy, while TELL THE TRUTH represented the younger, more experimental side of the city’s fashion landscape. That contrast is part of Milan’s appeal: polish and disruption, heritage and novelty, often exist only a few streets apart.
The same is true of its restaurants, and nowhere was that more apparent than at Ristorante Torre at Fondazione Prada. Here, food, art, architecture and fashion exist almost on top of one another, with the setting becoming as much a part of the experience as the meal itself. The restaurant feels inseparable from the wider cultural world around it, and during Fashion Week that connection seems especially pronounced. Both food and fashion depend on craftsmanship, presentation and the quality of their raw materials, and both can turn something practical into a form of self-expression. In each, the smallest decisions often make the greatest difference.
After a full day of appointments, Torre also offered something increasingly precious by that point in the week: the opportunity to sit down. Fashion Week has a way of making even the most basic pleasures feel unusually valuable, and a long dinner can become the first point in the day when there is time to properly register where you are. The restaurant was packed with the town’s glitterati, although I have to say I rather unfashionably left to go back to Speronari soon after dinner and a nightcap, just as the queue outside was starting to form for the foundation’s rooftop bar.
At Berton, namesake chef Andrea Berton offered another interpretation of contemporary Milan, one defined by precision and structure. The restaurant has a modern, almost architectural feel, and after several days spent looking at proportion, texture, color and construction on the runway, it became difficult not to notice those same qualities appearing on the plate. Fashion Week has a strange way of sharpening the eye; by the middle of the week, everything begins to be viewed in terms of composition.
Andrea Aprea presented a different mood again. His restaurant, inside historic museum Fondazione Luigi Rovati, brings together food, art and design in a way that feels particularly suited to Milan, but what stood out most was the change of pace. Fashion Week can be strangely noisy even when there is no music playing. Phones vibrate constantly, plans change by the minute and conversations rarely seem to finish before the next one begins. A serious dinner interrupts that rhythm and demands a different kind of attention.
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Milan after hours
That is perhaps why some of the most memorable moments of Fashion Week happen after the shows are over, when everyone finally sits around a table. Milan’s fashion and hospitality worlds overlap especially naturally here. Hotels are not simply places to sleep between appointments, restaurants are not merely places to eat and even beauty appointments become part of the wider experience of the week. The city itself becomes part of the production.
By the final days, a rhythm had emerged: leave Speronari, move between shows and appointments, collect Lola from DOGO and eventually arrive somewhere for dinner. It is a schedule that looks glamorous in photographs and somewhat less so when viewed through the number of steps walked in uncomfortable shoes and minutes spent trying to flag down a taxi, but that contrast is also part of the appeal.
Fashion Week offers an exaggerated version of Milan, yet it also reveals what the city does exceptionally well throughout the year: design, hospitality, food and an instinctive understanding of how all three can work together. Late at night, once the shows are over and the traffic begins to ease, Milan finally seems to exhale, and that may be when the city is at its most enjoyable, only to start again in the morning.
The runway provides the spectacle, but the conversations over dinner, the places discovered between appointments and the rituals surrounding the shows are what give Fashion Week its texture. By the time I left Milan, I had accumulated a formidable collection of invitations, photographs and laundry, but I had also eaten exceptionally well.
In Milan, that feels almost as important as what was on the runway.
