Bite-sized style news to know what’s happening in menswear this September

The fashion news and updates you need to know

By Benjamen Judd

Published: Sep 26, 2026

EVERY MONTH, the team at Esquire collect and curate the best and latest news in men’s style.

From the best new sneakers (hello Celine) and collections (who knew Travis Kelce would take so naturally to prep sensibilities) to the latest trends you need to know. This is your one-stop for all your water cooler fashion chat.

Here’s what you need to know in September.

Ahlem eyewear drops their new season right on time for summer

Paris-born designer Ahlem Manai-Platt has added bronze to her metalwork this season, in the form of a nickel-free temple that took more than a year to develop. Most eyewear makers avoid the material for its cost and difficulty, and its arrival is the headline detail in AHLEM’s Fall/Winter 2026 collection of 17 metal and acetate frames.

Metal styles are electroplated with palladium and finished in 22k gold, and the label’s signature circles and triangles now appear laser-engraved on their hinges. Staircase detailing along the temples references architecture, a constant in Manai-Platt’s work, while hand-hammered textures break up otherwise precise silhouettes.

The acetate frames are cut from cotton-derived stock in shades ranging from jewel tones to translucent neutrals, each tested on faces under changing light before approval. Bevels cut into each frame are there to catch and soften light, and the circle and triangle motifs stay on the front pins.

Manai-Platt founded AHLEM in 2014, and every frame is handmade in France’s network of eyewear ateliers, a community Manai-Platt has worked within since the beginning.

Bang & Olufsen open their new Sydney flagship

Things are sounding good at Martin Place. This month, Danish audio brand Bang & Olufsen unveiled the 162-square-metre boutique on 17 September, inside a neo-classical sandstone building in the CBD, in its centenary year.

The store is a joint project with Design Collection Denmark, the brand’s Australian partner since 2019, and follows the Collins Street flagship of 2024. Double Bay, the other Sydney store, is aimed at luxury residential clients. Martin Place targets business professionals, corporate clients, architects, interior designers and international clients.

Across three levels, a reception in deep blue and red leads to an earth-toned living room for the Atelier collection, and a green upper level holds a bar, a VIP listening room and a meeting space. Light oak sits against the original stone façade.

To mark the opening, Australian artist Holly Terry has reinterpreted the Beosound A9 speaker, which has an interchangeable front cover, for the Art of the A9 series. Her Sydney Edition, in bold colour and abstract expression, is sold exclusively at Martin Place ahead of a national rollout. The store shows the Beolab 90 Titan Edition, a made-to-order loudspeaker created for the brand’s centenary.

This is 201 words, with the news up top and the design and collaboration details following. The earlier flags still apply: the release calls 2026 the centenary year despite the 1925 founding, and it words the 17 September unveiling in the future tense, so I’ve assumed it went ahead.

UNIQLO x J.W. Anderson deliver the goods for spring

UNIQLO and Jonathan Anderson return for another season of borrowed prep school swagger, let loose in the sunshine this time round. The uniform has had its sleeves rolled up, quite literally: the oxford shirt finally comes short-sleeved, in yellow or a soft pink, cut boxy enough to wear open over one of the ten designer tees. Pair that with the baggy jeans and you have something that would not look out of place on the edge of a cricket pitch, or anywhere with a decent view of a river.

For the days when the weather cannot commit, there is a windproof short parka with an adjustable hem, or a genderless zip-up blouson dressed up with vintage workwear details, equally happy to be buttoned over a polo or slung on top of everything else. Speaking of polos, the dry pique version turns up in a startling 19 colours, enough to coordinate an entire regatta, and pairs neatly with the cotton linen cargo shorts for something that reads more boat club than actual boat club.

It all landed earlier this month so start stocking up on your new essentials.

A24 gets the Dior treatment

Dior and A24 have entered a two-year partnership spanning film, theatre and live events, with Dior named premier partner of New York’s Cherry Lane Theatre, the city’s oldest Off-Broadway venue, which A24 acquired in 2023 and reopened last September. Beyond sponsorship, the pair plan a joint programme connecting emerging and established creative talent with audiences, alongside initiatives supporting students entering film and theatre.

Jonathan Anderson, Dior’s creative director, has long treated cinema as a natural extension of his own design practice, and described the appeal of placing two creative worlds alongside each other and watching what surfaces that neither could reach alone.

The collaboration opens with an event marking the first anniversary of Cherry Lane’s reopening, headlined by Both Ends, a one-off performance from Justin Vivian Bond directed by Zack Winokur and inspired by poet and playwright Edna St Vincent Millay, one of the theatre’s founders. Anderson designed the costumes himself, dressing Bond in an archival piece by Paul Poiret, the same Paris couturier Millay once wore and whose work had also shaped Anderson’s Dior Winter 2026 collection.

Celine’s sneaker collab with Reebok is finally here

Remember when Celine sent a pair of well-worn Reeboks down its menswear runway back in June? We do. We haven’t stopped thinking about them, to be honest.

But enough about us because, finally, the collaboration is arriving to stores globally.

The trainer in question is Reebok’s 1982 Freestyle Lo, reworked by Celine creative director Michael Rider as his first major collaboration since taking the helm. It debuted as part of his standalone menswear show at the Tennis Club de Paris, styled alongside cummerbunds and patterned ties in a collection built on what Rider called “heritage two ways: Paris street, American movement.”

The finished sneaker comes in soft, pliable leather across eight colourways, from Peanut and Oxblood to Fluo Red and Butter, alongside white, black and beige. Originally designed by Angel Martinez in 1982 for the aerobics boom, the Freestyle Lo has stuck around as one of Reebok’s most enduring unisex shapes.

Following a launch event during New York Fashion Week, the collection arrives September 12 across Celine stores worldwide

When Tommy met Travis at The Plaza Hotel

Tommy Hilfiger has moved Travis Kelce into The Plaza Hotel for Fall 2026, the second chapter in a partnership that began earlier this year when the NFL tight end signed on as global ambassador and creative collaborator. Where the Spring 2026 campaign placed Kelce at Hilfiger’s Palm Beach home, “Only in New York” sets him inside the address Hilfiger called home for more than a decade, joined by Gigi Hadid, JISOO, Peggy Gou, Frances Tiafoe, Carmelo Anthony, and Tommy and Dee Hilfiger.

The Plaza has hosted Marilyn Monroe, Frank Sinatra, The Beatles and The Rolling Stones, and Hilfiger built one of his own defining chapters there during his years at the hotel. That history runs through “Prep Made Current” for Fall 2026: cable knit sweaters as the season’s central piece, alongside quarter-zips, reworked prep rugby shirts and the varsity jacket back in rotation. Outerwear spans transitional mixed-media jackets to refined wool pea coats and car coats, all rendered in Hilfiger’s signature red, white and blue.

Kelce has spoken about wearing the brand’s Sailing Gear jackets as a teenager, long before the ambassadorship became official. The partnership continues into Spring 2027 with a co-designed capsule collection. The Fall 2026 range arrives on tommy.com and in stores worldwide this season.

Harry Styles just made a great argument against the biggest menswear trend of the moment