Saul Nash: Milan Fashion Week AW 2026

​SøEdited Team
SøEditor-in-Chief: Chris Saint Sims 
​SøFashion Director: Savannah Barthorpe
Photography: Ik

Saul Nash presented Masquerade, unveiling a collection that examined clothing as both performance and protection

This collection begins with masquerade — not as decoration, but as behaviour. Prompted by Nash’s experience of Notting Hill Carnival, where costume operates as ceremony, mimicry, and release, the work considers what it means to dress as transformation. Venetian masquerade culture enters as parallel reference: concealment as power, anonymity as freedom. These histories are filtered through a London upbringing, resulting in a contemporary language of power dressing that moves fluidly between tailoring and sportswear.

Tailoring is dismantled and reassembled. Suit jackets arrive with built-in hoods and detachable sleeves, shifting formalwear into something adaptive and kinetic. Shirts are traced with graphic line-work inspired by Ben Magid Rabinovitch’s Tamaris from Dirge (1931), the illustration’s tension and contour translated into motion. Executed in stretch cottons and merino wool, these pieces extend Nash’s ongoing interest in movement into a more structured register.

A pinstriped all-in-one jumpsuit references 1980s power suiting, but is cut wide and deliberately warped on the body. It carries the authority of tailoring while moving with the theatricality of masquerade costume — presence without fixity.

Outerwear anchors the collection. Military drill jackets feature transformable collars designed to shift shape and function. Cropped trench coats employ Nash’s signature kinetic cutting techniques, while padded jackets with elongated ribbed-knit sleeves and exaggerated hems remain ultralight, insulated with PRIMALOFT Gold. Across categories, adaptability replaces rigidity. Clothes are designed to respond rather than dictate.

The palette remains grounded — greens, navies, and earthy browns — allowing texture to do the work. Silky utility trousers in LENZING™ Viscose are styled with crinkled recycled nylon zip-ups. Mohair blazers sit alongside alpaca and merino cardigans that expose the body, introducing controlled vulnerability into the silhouette.

The idea of the mask becomes literal. Compression tops printed with hazy body imagery and finished with funnel necks create the illusion of wearing another form. An over-dyed raw denim twinset, laser-etched with a chiselled torso, recalls classical depictions of the male body — strength rendered as surface, not certainty.

What emerges is a wardrobe that treats disguise as agency. Clothing not as armour, but as choice. Power, redefined through movement, concealment, and release.