Rhude Spring 2025 Menswear

Rhude’s recent seasons on the Paris Fashion Week menswear calendar, observed Rhuigi Villaseñor, “have been a great, great honor.” He added: “And now I think for our next frontier, what makes sense for us is to present in a way that allows us to showcase lifestyle.” Villaseñor said this in front of one of the world’s most exquisite (and exclusive) views: the vista over Lake Como from Villa d’Este.

While his exit from Bally alongside skirmishings (apparently now resolved) with a Rhude brand investor have left an undeniable miasma of jeopardy around Villaseñor, he is also a dogged and resolute self-made designer who has built a brand with excellent codes. As George Clooney intoned via a line from Ocean’s Eleven on this show’s soundtrack: “The house takes you, unless, when that perfect hand comes along, you bet big and you take the house.”

Villaseñor bet pretty big tonight. The location was in part explained via a new marketing partnership with Como 1907, the soccer team just promoted to Italy’s top league Serie A under the management of Arsenal legend Cesc Fabregas (who was here). And yet even with this local in, to show in Villa d’Este surely required plenty of capital. By far Lake Como’s fanciest (if staid) waterside hotel, its full complement of high-rolling summer guests—the cigar-fumed men in Hermès belts, Zegna sneakers, and plenty of linen, the women most frequently in Dolce Majolica-print—seemed variously delighted or bemused by this evening’s Rhude interruption.

The collection ran the Rhude gamut from some opening logo and cross Swarovski-embossed washed denim and long-sleeve tees (a nod to his LA origins) through to some cleverly tweaked tailoring that included four-button double-breasted jackets with a postmodern Armani-esque flavor (a salute to his Italian destination). Como basketball vests in gleamingly treated cotton, moto jackets in leather and sometimes bouclé, a cheekily satirical Virginia-facing tee-design, a prowl of excellent leopard print pieces (horsehair shoes and cotton drill shorts especially), and some new ’70s sneakers were amongst the highlights that crunched past. The designer’s intuitive feel for disassembling and revitalizing tropes of Americana was evident, as in past collections, through his material remixing of canonical garments plus the harmonic discordancy with which he played preppiness against post-streetwear codes. The stuff looked good. 

Waiters craned their necks from the restaurant and cicadas hummed from the hills as Villaseñor slouched down the Renaissance staircase to duck his head and wave a gold bangled hand in thanks at the applause from show guests and hotel guests alike. Speedboats to the after-party across the lake awaited by the Villa d’Este jetty. This Rhude presentation showcased lifestyle for sure, but the collection was the destination your eye kept returning to.