As the fashion set descended on Milan, click-clacking between Versace, Fendi, and Bar Basso, normal Italians were just – I don’t know – walking around. And yet, for Dazed’s roving street style photographer, Yu Fujiwara, that’s where this season’s most interesting portraits emerged. Weaving between all the homosessuali in their scooped-vests and saucer sunnies, fashion editors in buttery Prada macs, and alt-influencers wearing Hello Kitty hair clips, were the city’s ordinary denizens going about their business. 

To approach street style photography in this way is to lay bare fashion week for what it is: a big, glossy, trade show. There’s a lot of talk about taste at the moment, and whether it’s empty crisp bags or the appearance of jockstraps on the runway, it’s clear that the borders between what is and what isn’t considered fashion are dissipating. A gaudy holdall compulsively graffitied with the words “milano” and “made in Italy” could easily have been of Balenciaga’s making, for example. “It’s been about two-and-a-half years since I’ve attended a men’s fashion week in June and I was keen to see what COVID had changed in both Milan and Pitti,” Fujiwara explained. 

“Many big maisons were absent from this season’s roster so I found myself on the outskirts of smaller shows with a more interesting crowd in attendance,” he added, noting how Simon Cracker, who made his fashion week debut in the capital was one example. “It put forward new ideas surrounding the traditional notion of Italian masculinity.” From skunk-haired It girls, to selfie-taking tourists, and Pitti Uomo’s newgen peacocks, click through the gallery above to see Yu Fujiwara’s dispatches from the SS23 menswear season.