FASHION'S NEW ERA HAS BEGUN. BUT HAS ANYTHING REALLY CHANGED?

Top image: Reworked classic silhouette cap-toe pumps at Chanel SS’26 debut by Matthieu Blazy (closest thing on the market might be these Bally Samya pumps right now)

This season promised to redefine luxury, but it was mostly the shoes that stuck.

We needed more than a week to process fashion’s twelve-headed Spring/Summer 2026 debut wave. Newly appointed creative directors (eleven men and one woman, just saying) took their turn on stage, houses recalibrated, and the fashion landscape shifted beneath our feet. Or did it? We were promised disruption, but did we really get it?

Matthieu Blazy for Chanel, Jonathan Anderson for Dior, Louise Trotter for Bottega Veneta, Demna Gvasalia for Gucci, Pierpaolo Piccioli for Balenciaga, Glenn Martens for Maison Margiela, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez for Loewe, Miguel Castro Freitas for Mugler, Duran Lantink for Jean Paul Gaultier, Alessandro Michele for Valentino, Simone Bellotti for Jil Sander, and Dario Vitale for Versace. This new wave of creative energy was supposed to bring back desire. A return to instinct, imagination, and something human after years of sameness. But we have to ask ourselves: can new visual languages flourish in a world flattened by algorithms? This new guard faces the same pressures as those before them, the ones who built billion-dollar empires too big to walk away from. Business models driven by speed, volume, and scale still leave little room for originality, replacing risk with safety and innovation with repetition.

Even Demna, stepping into Gucci, admitted as much. “I tried to push for transition time,” he explained to BOF last September. “I told Kering I cannot do a Gucci show this year because I need a kind of transition. I can’t do a show in parallel, or make a show in two months. And they were like, ‘It’s ok that you do your first show in February, but the stores need product.’ So I was like, ‘Let me find something, a compromise that can work without being a show, without being a full-blown collection.’” This resulted in a series of 37 portrait looks of characters who epitomised ‘the Gucciness of Gucci’.

The shrunken knit, Jil Sander SS’26 look 32 by Simone Bellotti

THE ELDER STATESMAN Cropped cashmere crewneck, ARKET Iris signature long-sleeve T-shirt, KHAITE Corben low-rise jeans and DRIES VAN NOTEN leather loafers (here in patent)

Charon: “This season promised a revolution but seemed to be sending us to the archives instead. Some succeeded in reintroducing heritage elements while leaving a distinct mark, like Bellotti at Jil Sander. Jil Sander herself was a true minimalist, a quality that often got blurred during the Luke and Lucie Meier years, when the house leaned more toward the old Céline aesthetic. Bellotti understands that Jil’s power was not in excess but in what was left unsaid. The unisex shrunken knit from Bellotti’s SS26 debut might be my seasonal favorite. Michael Rider’s Celine, on the other hand, was attractive yet indecisive, still caught between two eras: Hedi Slimane’s skinny jeans and logo fixation on one side, and that unmistakable Phoebe energy on the other. Instead of transforming the codes into something new, it made me question the year I was living in.

A subtle reference I did truly love was the deafening children’s orchestra playing the soundtrack to Glenn Martens’s first Maison Margiela show. It felt like a nod not only to the future but also to one of Mr. Margiela’s most iconic show moments, Autumn 1989, staged in a children’s indoor playground where guests sat cross-legged on the floor as models carried children on their shoulders and strolled hand in hand through the park.”

Christian Dior’s SS’26, look 47 and CD-shaped footbed shoes

Lara: “Jonathan Anderson’s take on Dior felt refreshingly alive for a house that has lingered too long on tulle skirts, logo tees, and chunky boots. The collection was tactile and human, with woven yarns sculpted into dresses and capes tossed over denim minis that became even more visible during the re-see I got to attend. The accessories, especially those delicate bow heels, were instant wish-list material. Designed in collaboration with one of The Ceiling’s favorite shoe designers, Nina Christen, Dior’s codes were reinterpreted — bows, flowers, femininity — in subtle, intelligent ways. (That CD-shaped footbed deserves an award.) See Anderson’s informal take on Dior’s SS26 shoes by Loïc Prigent here.

Chanel SS’26

Equally, at Chanel, the true heroes of the show were undoubtedly the footwear. The classic two-tone pump got a modern twist with higher heels, elastic edges, and unexpected colors like turquoise. Now left with an obsession for all things in this shade, I’d bet these will sell out before they even hit the shelves. The same might go for the outstanding shirts made in collaboration with Charvet. Chanel, rarely one for collaborations, made an exception for the Parisian shirting house where Gabrielle Chanel’s lover, Boy Capel, was said to shop exclusively for his shirts and suits. Unlike previous seasons, I wasn’t as smitten with The Row’s collection, but the scraped-back hair look caught my eye — and the rest of the internet’s — going viral and overshadowing the actual clothing.

The Row Spring 2026, hair by Guido Palau

SOPHIE BUHAI Rivoli comb, BOTTEGA VENETA Silver Ellipse hair clip (or this one), MACHETE French hair pin (for US here) and ARKET Croco-effect leather hair clip. (Or try these pins from COS, LIÉ STUDIO, COMPLETEDWORKS and GOHAR WORLD)

It seems that this spring/summer, what truly captivated us weren’t the silhouettes but the shoes, the settings, and the subtle details. The clothes themselves felt less like a fresh vision and more like a reflection of the times, a quiet, repetitive unease echoing an anxious and unequal world. Pieter Mulier translated that mood into Alaïa’s latest collection through technique and emotion. “I wanted clothes that cry,” he said, a feeling made tangible in the knee-high fringe socks trembling beneath long layers. Yet the cocoon-shaped top dresses, which bound the models’ arms, felt strangely at odds with the women they were meant to honor. Unsettling, much like Margiela’s stitched “polite grin” mouthpiece, conceptually sharp yet hinting at the kind of forced smiles we all give in the world today.

“Clothes that cry”, Alaïa SS’26, look 39

Let’s say the much-hyped revival was more about ideas than real reinvention. What we got was a lot of replay instead of reset. But is it even possible to design against a system everyone is simply trying to survive within? Maybe we were all expecting too much, too soon. It does make us wonder: will the next great creative revolution come from the archives or from the courage to stop repeating them?