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MILAN — Milan has a message for Hillary Clinton.

“We’re all looking at what will happen, and we will be available to welcome the new president of America — whoever she may be,” Prime Minister Matteo Renzi said at the opening lunch of the week. It pretty much set the tone.

By the time the collections drew to an end just before the first presidential debate, with the front row whiling away the time before the shows in discussion about where to watch and when (and whether it was better to stay up until 2:30 a.m. local time, or to set an alarm and get some sleep first), the Italian fashion world’s position was clear.

Virginia Raggi may be the first woman mayor of Rome, but it is Mrs. Clinton who is on Italians’ minds and influencing their catwalks. They’ve had their own Trump experience, after all, with former Prime Minister Silvio Berlusconi. For them, it’s personal. Time for a woman to “take the lead,” as the chorus of a trance song written by Violet + Photonz and introduced on Friday went.

The occasion? Not an election rally: the Versace show (arguably they were almost the same thing).

In case you missed that point, further lyrics included: “If we do nothing, we get nothing,” and “Our future is up for grabs.” Turns out Donatella Versace had swapped her erstwhile Roman goddess muse for a power player with her feet on the ground and her head in the game.

So there was the power athlete Serena Williams, in crop top and leggings, on the front row; and there were the power walkers Naomi Campbell and Carmen Kass, as well as the Insta-power Gigi Hadid, on the runway. And there were clothes made for action. Of numerous kinds.

Sporting details and materials were mixed with millennial business suiting: leggings worn under a double-breasted belted blazer; billowing nylon Wonder Woman coats trimmed in crystals; sheath dresses in primary shades shaped by ruched drawstring pulls into curvilinear forms, and black pantsuits (well, there had to be a few) sliced by a knife-edge curve of color from shoulder to thigh.

None of this was particularly new for the house, and there were prints, too, and black sheaths, seams traced by studs, as expected, but it crystallized a shift in emphasis from clothes that communicate power-through-sex to clothes that communicate power-through-self-confidence. It’s a pretty significant change, and probably not a coincidental one.

And so it went. At Jil Sander, Rodolfo Paglialunga put pinstripes and enormous shoulder pads on the agenda, as well as techno-pleated dresses and shirts with arms curved wide as a Komodo dragon’s ruff. It was a little Vetements-meets-Pleats Please, and drop-crotch leather Bermuda shorts with a matching jacket are unlikely to take off in the boardroom (or anywhere else for that matter), but a banker’s shirt over a caviar-beaded skirt traced with smoke was a step in the right direction.

A better embrace of the battering-ram shoulder, however, was on view at Marni. Consuelo Castiglioni took the stuffing out of structure in not-so-simple layers of basic separates (jackets and shirts and jumpsuits and dresses) all hung with bulbous saddle bags at the waist, and used nautical ropes to shirr unexpected shapes into a dress’s drape, so they suggested the safari that is everyday life. A day at the office can be a challenge and an adventure, after all; here’s what to wear.

Even Antonio Marras used his collection to make a statement in favor of diversity, equality and the patchwork nation via literal patchwork: chintz, batik and gingham; denim (faded and dark), baguette beading and metallic lace; gingham and raffia, all of it collaged and combined in dresses and coats and suits and shorts for both men and women. They wore the same prints and attitude, if not exactly the same shapes.

Indeed, though only a few brands formally announced they were combining the sexes this season, almost every catwalk thus far has acknowledged the false separation between men’s and women’s wear, and started taking initial steps to blend the two. “Well, why not? We don’t live separately,” Tomas Maier said backstage after his Bottega Veneta show, one of the few to offer a full proposition for both genders.

He did it nominally as a one-time celebration of the brand’s 50th anniversary (and his 15 years as creative director), but said he thought it would continue. After all, men and women share the same platforms, do the same jobs, run for the same office; they are part of the same story. Besides, he said, “I dislike any kind of classification: skin, size, age, gender. It’s something I detest.”

So on his runway were many models past and present, as well as Lauren Hutton, age 72 (who, albeit younger, also appeared as a photographic icon in the Tod’s ode to leather: leather baseball shirts and leather trench coats, fringed leather dresses and leather shorts; leather skirts and leather halters; and so on and so forth — more leather). All in looks that likewise resisted labels, except that they communicated a palpable sense of the grown-up.

The Bottega silhouettes were easy, and discrete — full skirts or trousers, narrow shoulders, nipped-in waists — in moody colors with jolts of persimmon and hot pink. Ostrich and crocodile outerwear mixed with tissue-thin ribbed cotton and crinkled cotton raffia; evening gowns in chintz linen (there was a lot of discreet cross-fertilization going on) were given a twist at the bodice or waist and bound with leather straps and tuxedos in iridescent silk lay easy on the frame.

All the epaulets and collars and belting were detachable, and could be added and subtracted according to mood (and the need to communicate command). They were not shouty clothes, but rather clothes for the detail-oriented, with the self-contained authority of the well-informed.

Sound familiar?

At the end of the show, Mr. Maier took his bow alongside the men and woman of the design studio, not in the uniform white coats of the atelier but dressed as themselves. A few hundred artisans from Vicenza who work on the collection cheered them on from the audience.

They were with — O.K., him , but you get the point. It has resonance, even over here.