MILAN — When Marco Falcioni stepped out of near-anonymity in 2022 as the newly minted senior vice president of creative direction at Boss, the industry set itself to wait-and-see mode.
The brand was going through a major revamp spearheaded by chief executive officer Daniel Grieder, who had joined a year earlier from Tommy Hilfiger, tasked with reversing the fortunes of the German company.
Four years in, with the title of creative director, Falcioni’s tenure — which builds on his previous seven years spent at the German brand in design studio roles — has proven to be an interesting journey. His mission has been radical in its simplicity: broadening the brand’s appeal among younger consumers from within, without disowning Boss’ roots in formalwear.
“My [creative] vision, to be honest — and I feel lucky for that — goes hand in hand with the strategy that we have set for the brand, it’s something that we build together as a team. Since the rebranding in 2022, internally we say that we’ve shaken up the giants. We showed to everybody that the brand was alive, that we are capable of trying [new] things, and I think that’s what matters the most, that every success, and even when it was not necessarily a success, it was worth it and it was a learning [experience],” Falcioni said in a preview interview ahead of Boss’ fall 2026 show on Thursday in Milan.
“With my team, we are refining and sharpening [the aesthetics] and trying to be more consistent, because we’ve been lucky enough to have a platform to learn and to add important bricks to. The brand is a pyramid, and we’re building on the foundations of the brand, [embracing directions that] it was worth trying even if they are not necessarily what we need in the future. We’re not playing safe…we’re taking very bold decisions but based on the experience we collect year after year,” Falcioni said.
The fall collection adds another brick, as Falcioni seeks to reignite the pleasure of toying with tailoring and dressing up.
This goal reveals a lot about Falcioni’s attitude-driven design approach, which, he said, is not necessarily about courting a niche but providing different customers with designs they can relate to and leverage to express their individuality.
In that sense, Falcioni is not concerned about whether his designs are seen as pop or democratic, as he put it. He just declines to see Boss’ bread and butter sartorialwear as a uniform.
“One of the very first things that was very important to me was to give tailoring a meaning,” he said. “Uniformity is not our way to go into the future. I think that individuality and the pleasure of tailoring [are achieved]…when we create a design that is democratic and popular, which intrinsically carries the value of non-conformity and inclusivity.
“Tailoring is the backbone of the brand’s DNA and every season I challenge myself and the organization to bring in a new dimension, or to explore forgotten corners of the archives and new possibilities,” he said about the starting point for fall.
“We did a little bit of beautiful confusion, as I like to call it,” the designer said, characterizing the different eras referenced in most of the sartorial looks for fall.
Late ‘80s power shoulders, slightly dropped, are countered by a cinched waist, high buttoning and notch lapels, the latter two references to ‘90s tailoring. Falcioni brought back the double flap pockets on double-breasted blazers, for men and women alike, and paired the suits with equestrian-inspired boots shaped after an archival men’s loafer, for example.
“We’ve been referencing more precisely archival pieces in a few other shows. But I think it’s time to mix the cards, to create something new for the people [Boss customers] coming next and to give a third dimension to the brand. So I think the [approach was the] aggregation of the tailoring timeline.
“The new dimension is that with this ‘confusion,’ we want to bring tailoring in a landscape that is more lifestyle… not necessarily into the business [side], but more [attuned to] hybrid situations. We want to be a little bit more real. And we want our women and our men to embrace different moments [of their lives] and really pursue the lifestyle [aspect of the] brand, the narrative and what we represent, [because] we’re not just tailoring,” he said.
The designer is hoping to achieve that by adding playful touches, such as pocket squares, silk scarves peeking from under the collars of tops, ties artfully worked into floral brooches or using bibbed tuxedo shirts under office-bound suits to create off-kilter contrasts.
A preview look at Boss fall 2026.
Joris Haas/Courtesy of Boss
“The story itself is about how pleasure can go [hand in hand] with the tailoring,” Falcioni enthused. “It’s about indulging in decorative elements, which make even a very flat suit, if you want…a bit more personal. There are a lot of decorative elements, but they’re clearly coming from the archives of the company, translated into a new domain…[to spark] the pleasure of tailoring, the pleasure of dressing up, like a gesture, an artful dimension with the suit at its core, as always,” Falcioni explained.
In menswear, the same approach resonates in the abundance of suit separates which in Falcioni’s spirit of play-the-dressing-up-game best convey the effortless goal of a man taking time to pick the right pants, blazer and shirt and tie.
Unexpected detours on archival tropes extend to outerwear, done for example in meaty leather with a tough look, but bonded with cashmere, lined in stripey fabrics in the vein of the most traditional Boss overcoats and complemented with horn buttons or stripey linings.
Although the collection rarely skews casual, there is a hidden performance component in the selection of fabrics boasting wrinkle-free, water- and wind-proof qualities, or in the sumptuous pairing of brushed alpaca and nylon for trenchcoats with sartorial lapels.
“The best game in the archives of Boss is about coats and blazers. So when it comes to outerwear, it’s where we bring more and diversified expertise and where, from a certain point of view, we can experiment,” Falcioni said. “Even if we refer to an archetype which is not necessarily a Boss archetype, we drag it into our universe and filter it through the brand’s [lens],” he explained.
The fall 2026 show is also the first winter collection to be paraded on the runway since the brand realigned with the traditional presentation calendar, after toying with the see now, buy now format until fall 2023. The previous two runway collections aligned with the calendar were both spring lineups.
Some accessories from the fall collection will be available to purchase online immediately after the show, for Hugo Boss XP members.
The Boss shows have been highly anticipated at Milan Fashion Week, also thanks to the buzzy setups, from the fall 2023 sci-fi office space filled with cubicles and the humanoid robot Sophia to the idyllic, soothing garden mounted inside the courtyard of the Palazzo del Senato for spring 2025.
The inclusive and celebrity-led castings — comprising supermodels, athletes, editors, social media stars and artists from Naomi Campbell and Fortune to tennis players Matteo Berrettini and Taylor Fritz, among others — have also typically fueled attention.
Falcioni declined to share too many details about the format of the upcoming runway show, set to take place at a minimalist venue on the outskirts of eastern Milan.
“It’s different, it’s not going to be necessarily like celebrities walking the show. We’ve had very inclusive or experimental or daring castings and we are still committed to that, but from a slightly different angle,” Falcioni said. “The show setup is always a little bit of a laboratory for us to say, ‘How can we entertain the audience?’ because the show is not just about the collection anymore. So, there’s going to be some special effects.
“The surprise comes from an element we have usually never put so much accent on,” Falcioni hinted.