The 2025 GQ Fashion Awards

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

The Return of Prep

Clockwise from top left: Fior, Dragone/Gorunway.com; Karwai Tang/Getty Images for Ralph Lauren; courtesy of Bally; courtesy of Adidas; courtesy of NN.07; courtesy of Sperry; courtesy of J. Press; XNY/Star Max/GC Images; Visionhaus/Getty Images; Joe Scarnici/Getty Images for Prime Video; Raymond Hall/GC Images; MEGA/GC Images; Wooden Sleepers; Bowen Fernie; courtesy of Celine/Gorunway.com.

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

Jaeger-LeCoultre Reverso

Courtesy of the brand

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 at Dior Men

Alfredo Piola; Umberto Fratini/Gorunway.com