Look of the Year
When Jonathan Anderson’s first look for Dior hit the runway, it was cause for a double take: Cargo shorts? A tweedy blazer? Socks and—gasp—sandals? Indeed, Anderson’s audacious overhaul of French fashion’s crown jewel took the house’s legacy head-on and twisted it in unexpected ways. The opening salvo was a righteous statement of intent: Going forward, the fit seemed to insinuate, Dior will no longer merely propose what to wear but how to dress. “The first look is really important because it lays out exactly where I want to take this brand,” Anderson says. “It’s about the history, and then reinventing the history.” Here, the designer helps us decode the layers of references he packed into look one. —Samuel Hine
Show of the Year
Julian Klausner’s debut for Dries Van Noten in June had none of the high--budget whizbang that’s par for the course at Paris Fashion Week. There was an almost serene chillness in the air as guests took their seats under bright skylights in a raw concrete hangar. And then: fireworks. Van Noten was a master of the goosebump-raising runway show, where every element of the production—the lighting, the set, the cast, the soundtrack, and especially the clothes—harmonized in a crescendo of emotion. It turns out that his protégé and successor was taking notes. All Klausner needed was a collection of brightly colored, messily-formal garments and a pitch-perfect soundtrack of Lou Reed demos and remixes to deliver an instant classic debut. Reed’s “Perfect Day” has provided the rhythm to many runway shows over the years, but never has it been deployed to such memorable effect; when the chorus dropped just as the pack of floral-clad models charged out for the finale, the crowd hooted and whistled as if the late Velvet Underground singer himself had just taken the stage. —S.H.
Designer of the Year
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On a beautiful evening in July, Haider Ackermann is sitting on the roof of his Tom Ford design studio in Paris. It’s golden hour on one of the longest days of the year, i.e., well past quitting time, yet the office is still frantic with activity. When I note the hour, the designer responds with a wistful sigh. “When you have a new love affair, you just want to go for it,” he says. “You don’t count the hours. You’re not tired, because you just have this love going through your veins. It makes your heart beat and it keeps you up at night.”
The Colombian-born French designer was named creative director of Tom Ford in the fall of 2024, and the relationship had aroused all of men’s fashion. In fact, Ackermann’s March debut suggested that he might be the most seductive designer working today. In a small auditorium just off Place Vendôme, guests entered the dimly lit confines of a make-believe private room somewhere between the Studio 54 that Mr. Ford (as Ackermann invariably refers to him) used to frequent and the hedonistic clubs of Ackermann’s Antwerp youth. Once the preshow martinis were polished off, models skulked around the room in clothes that had a titillating, intimate edge. There were ’80s banker-pinstripe suits cut with long, languid trousers; silk robes and playful pops of color; a tuxedo shirt unbuttoned to the tank top underneath.
To read more about GQ's designer of the year, click below.
The Tom Ford creative director introduced a new vision of power dressing that has seduced us all.
Store of the Year
When veteran retail guru Chris Green opened Ven. Space last September, Brooklyn’s leafy Carroll Gardens neighborhood experienced an immediate uptick in menswear nerds per capita. For good reason: The vibiest addition to New York’s resurgent brick-and-mortar scene is welcoming and stocked to the brim with hard-to-find labels sourced from Stockholm, Tokyo, and every locus of cool in between. Swing by on any given day of the week and you’re liable to encounter Green himself gently steering wide-eyed shoppers toward paper-thin button-ups from Casey Casey or the slubby Comoli fleece they wouldn’t be able to try on anywhere else. —Avidan Grossman
Sneakers of the Year
For much of the 2020s, the phrase designer sneakers invoked bloated images of dopey dad shoes, post-irony Balenciaga Triple S stompers, and Succession’s Kendall Roy wearing box-fresh kicks as an ill-fated ploy to hypebeast his way into an investment deal. Finally, fashion has conjured a slimmer antidote: torpedo sneakers. The balletic silhouette—taking form in Prada’s Collapse trainer, Margiela’s Sprinters, and Dries Van Noten’s retro Suede—has pranced its way into the highly influential closets of Harry Styles, Jacob Elordi, and Matty Healy. More aspirational than a Samba and only slightly less pricey than a name-brand loafer, these svelte steppers are menswear’s answer to TikTok’s beloved “coquette aesthetic.” —Eileen Cartter
Campaign of the Year
How do you cook up the sexiest ads of the summer? If you’re Dolce & Gabbana, you go back in the vault and re-create your landmark 2007 Light Blue campaign starring David Gandy in Capri—only updated for 2025 with British actor Theo James and the buzzy Italian model Vittoria Ceretti. The results were a phenomenon in their own right, nostalgic and sensual and skin-happy in all the right ways. —Savannah Sobrevilla
Trend of the Year
Get your gold-button blazers and Nantucket Reds ready: Preppy clothing is well and truly back. After a menswear renaissance driven by the aesthetics of flashy streetwear on one side and quiet luxury on the other, the prep renaissance suggests that it’s possible to have it both ways—that you can dress bombastic and understated in equal measure. And men have embraced the preppy paradigm with fraternity--pledge-level enthusiasm. These days, the It bag is a busted L.L.Bean boat tote. Repp ties are newly collectible. Boat shoes are replacing loafers en masse. That pop you hear is the sound of a million turned-up polo shirt collars. It’s a return to the classics, yet the contemporary prep trend is anything but conventional. —S.H.
Watch of the Year
For a 94-year-old watch, Jaeger-LeCoultre’s venerable Reverso—which boasts a flippable dial originally meant to protect it during polo matches—has had the sort of blockbuster year normally reserved for fresh-faced breakouts. It was worn by a slew of Hollywood stars (Walton Goggins on SNL, Nicholas Hoult at the Superman premiere) and dropped in a gaggle of covetable variations, from artful iterations adorned with tiny enamel paintings to wildly complex minute repeaters. But 2025’s most sublime Reverso is one of the simplest: an 18-karat pink-gold edition with a Milanese bracelet so splashy, you could strap a Scrabble tile to it and it’d still be the watch of the year. There were plenty of major new timepieces in 2025, but none were as effortlessly spectacular as this one. —Cam Wolf
Finale of the Year
Kim Jones was already a shoo-in for the menswear hall of fame. His taste in art and subculture defined men’s fashion over his seven-year reign at Dior, during which he collaborated with the disparate likes of Raymond Pettibon, Air Jordan, Hajime Sorayama, and Shawn Stussy along the way. And then came his phenomenal, poetic January men’s show, which will go down as one of the great swan songs in fashion history. It was, as the designer put it, “pure Dior”—a parade of aristocratic tailoring and sophisticated sportswear that was met with a rousing and well-deserved standing ovation. “When you’re in a house for quite a long time, you can get bored of things sometimes,” Jones said. “So you want to just really flip it and make it clean so you can start going in a different direction.” —S.H.
Breakthrough Designer of the Year
Mike Amiri has everything most designers dream about: Stores around the world. Multiple hit products. A booming business. A loving family (no biggie). Now, he also has the fashion world in the palm of his hand, thanks to the lavish vision of Old Hollywood elegance he unleashed on the Paris runways. It wasn’t so long ago that the establishment wrote Amiri off as merely a West Coast skinny jeans brand beloved by celebrities. But in 2025, Mike capped off a yearslong creative evolution with an array of opulent suits and swaggering knits that won over his critics—and inspired guys like Travis Kelce and Usher to swap their usual hoodies for glamorous blazers. “For me, Amiri is a very long-term project,” he says. “It’s about building a world step-by-step.” —S.H.
The Year in Viral Moments
Every year, fashion memes itself closer to the sun. But even as the industry at large (nay, the whole world?) teeters ever closer to skibidi-whatever no-man’s-land, there are always a handful of viral hits that put some honest-to-goodness pep in our steps. In 2025, we treasured fashion’s unambiguous statements—including Conner Ives’s “Protect the Dolls” tee, which emphasized that trans rights should always be a talking point in fashion, and Willy Chavarria’s moving Paris Fashion Week statement against ICE. We reveled in Louis Vuitton’s Darjeeling Limited–inspired trunks, as well as the movement of men baring toes in designer flip-flops from ERL and The Row. (Not unrelatedly, thank goodness Rick Owens and his tattooed tootsies found a foot-friendly—and presumably lucrative—home on OnlyFans.) We bopped along to Katseye’s good jeans and “Milkshake” moves in that Gap ad, winced along with everyone else when Margiela models hit the runway in metallic mouth props that stretched their maws into Edvard Munch–esque screams, and appreciated Saint Laurent’s kinky leather waders even when seemingly every famous man’s stylist put them on a red carpet. And yes, we even had a soft spot for those damn Labubus. What are we, heartless? —E.C.
A version of this story originally appeared in the December 2025/January 2026 issue with the title “The 2025 GQ Fashion Awards”.
