Milan Men's Fashion Week: Socks and Scandals Italy may be a scandal-battered, deep-in-deficit nation facing bail-out, yet its factories still produce most of the world's swankiest men's ready-to-wear clothes. The full extent of the contradiction at the heart of men's fashion can be revealed by its troubling attitude towards socks. For hosiery-wise, where 99 per cent of the world's men would reject socks, men's fashion perversely embraces them. Take the latest collections from Burberry, Versace and Prada, which will go on sale for the summer of 2013 and were presented in Milan over the past few days. While all very different, they share the same odd sock philosophy. At Burberry there were Quality Street-coloured metallic coats, shirts, sunglasses and bags (plus socks with sandals); at Versace it was budgie-smugglers, sleeveless suits and boxing belts (plus socks with sandals); while Prada presented melancholic unisex sportswear (plus socks with sandals). Yet any sane man knows that socks and sandals are the nadir of style, a foul German-on-holiday combination guaranteed to repel. Elsewhere, you can observe the flip-side of this menswear sock syndrome: where most males would immediately thrust their feet into socks' cottony grip, fashion and its followers summarily reject them. There is a cult of the ankle that extends from the Chinese fashion editor who favours a blond wig and floral trousers with slip-ons (and no socks) to the colourful, Italian-magnate casual suiting of Gucci (which is celebrating 60 years of its moccasin while entirely overlooking the sock), to the vast majority of the European and American fashion fraternity, who expose increasingly generous expanses of moisturised, sock-free calf every time they sit down to watch a show. Jeremy Langmead, of men's fashion store MrPorter.com, even has a turn-up rule, "never fold more than twice"; and one fashion editor has been battling through the week (it is warm in Milan) with ankles so increasingly swollen that the last time I saw him they were bulging north of his yellow, sockless brogues like two about-to-pop scarlet balloons. It all seems ridiculous. It all is ridiculous. Yet this tiny band of sock-spurning professional peacocks are at the apex of a recession-busting, rivers-of-gold fashion sector that is vastly outperforming its female equivalent. A report by Bain & Co concluded that men's "luxury" clothes now represent 40 per cent of the entire fashion market, were worth $240 billion in 2011 (compared to $440 billion for all men's clothes sales), and grew by 14 per cent last year - nearly double the rate of womenswear. A department store buyer looking for new season stock to fill hundreds of shops across North America told me that Jimmy Choo's British-designed, lustrous, sometimes pornographically printed men's shoes are achieving an "80 per cent" full-price sales record, and MrPorter.com's Langmead cheerily reports the site is selling as almost as many man‑bags and designer next-winter gear as it can get hold of. Italy may be a scandal-battered, deep-in-deficit nation facing bail-out, yet its factories still produce most of the world's swankiest men's and women's ready-to-wear clothes. Hence Milan's status as capital of the commercial fashion world. Italy's big beast brands - including Prada, Armani, Gucci and Dolce & Gabbana - are at the heart of the blokes-clothes boom, which is why non-Italian brands, such as Calvin Klein, Burberry and Vivienne Westwood, hold their collections here. Sock-wise, then, they've got it all wrong. But stock-wise, the Italian fashion business - although camper and every bit as barmy as Zoolander suggested - really knows its business. See our roundup from Milan Men's Fashion Week here