The spring 2026 menswear shows are getting started—Pitti Uomo officially kicks off tomorrow, but this past weekend Martine Rose and Charles Jeffrey Loverboy showed collections in London. Ahead of what is sure to be an impactful season, Will Welch, GQ’s global editorial director joined Nicole Phelps on The Run-Through to discuss the current state of menswear. “This [season] feels particularly big,” says Welch, referring to the debuts that will take place in the coming weeks. Chief among them is Jonathan Anderson’s introduction as the newly appointed creative director at Dior, but also the American designer Michael Rider’s first show for Celine and Julian Klausner’s inaugural Dries Van Noten menswear show following his womenswear debut last March.

“I love going into a show with as open of a mind as possible,” says Welch. “I think it’s always interesting when somebody has come out of the atelier and is now taking over as the designer—because you never know to what extent they were successful at serving the vision of the existing designer and what was their own voice. I started working at GQ under Jim Nelson, my predecessor editor in chief, and I was serving his vision, and then got the chance to express my own vision, which was related but also different. And it’s really fun to see that.”

Welch also talks about the push he’s feeling to get dressed up—a concept that GQ has equally been urging its readers to get into. “Post-pandemic it was hard, I think in general, for men to get excited to get dressed again; there was this ease and this casualness, [but] people got tired of that, so there’s this idea of really getting dressed now,” he explains. “Wanting to get dressed with a sense of occasion and formality feels exciting.”

Tune in to the conversation to learn about Welch’s favorite under-the-radar designers, what it takes to get Brad Pitt into thigh-high Saint Laurent boots, and how Andre 3000 ended up designing Welch’s suit for this year’s Met Gala celebrating “Superfine: Tailoring Black Style.”