When Marco Falcioni stepped into the creative director role at Boss, the brief was deceptively simple: bring younger consumers in without pushing the brand’s formalwear heritage out. Four years on, he’s still building on that foundation — and for fall 2026, the focus sharpened around something that sounds almost nostalgic in the current fashion climate: the genuine pleasure of tailoring.

“One of the very first things that was very important to me was to give tailoring a meaning,” Falcioni said ahead of the Milan show. For him, that means refusing to treat the suit as a uniform — something you put on because you have to, not because you want to. “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.”

The fall collection pursues that tension through what Falcioni cheerfully calls “a little bit of beautiful confusion” — a deliberate collision of sartorial references from different decades. Late eighties power shoulders, slightly dropped, sit against cinched waists and high buttoning lifted from nineties tailoring. Double flap pockets return on double-breasted blazers for both men and women. Suits are paired with equestrian-inspired boots shaped after an archival men’s loafer. Each reference is legible but none are dominant — the point being that the clothes belong to no single era and therefore feel available to anyone.

Falcioni describes Boss as a pyramid, and his job as adding careful bricks to an existing foundation rather than rebuilding from the ground up. He is not chasing a niche, he said — he’s after something broader and harder to engineer: designs that different people can find themselves in and use to express who they actually are. Whether that reads as pop or democratic doesn’t concern him. What matters is that the clothes have attitude without demanding conformity.

Seven years in the brand’s design studios before taking the creative director title gives Falcioni an unusual vantage point — deep institutional knowledge combined with enough distance from it to push back when needed. The results, by his own account, haven’t all been successes. But he seems to regard the misses as useful data rather than failures. “Every success, and even when it was not necessarily a success — it was worth it and it was a learning experience.” That’s not a bad philosophy for a house still very much in the process of figuring out what it wants to be next.