New York Fashion Week Spring 2026 Best Moments

A recap of New York Fashion Week Spring 2026 Best Moments, complete with insider highlights.

New York Fashion Week Spring 2026 kicked off almost a full week before the actual shows this season. By all accounts, events started the Friday preceding the official Thursday calendar opening and swept through the city like a flaming stiletto missing its heel caps. Everyone now refers to the days leading up to fashion week as a “mini fashion week”. Here, the Spring 2026 highlights, from an insider point of view.

Talented Women Emerging Designers Owned the Season

NYFW isn’t dead if you’re doing it the right way: by prioritizing the emerging designers over the larger, household names. Many of the most talented rising designers in New York right now are women; a fact we should be wholeheartedly celebrating and screaming from the rooftops.

• Like Grace Ling who puts a focus on sculptural, minimalist tailoring or Tyler McGillivary who has an innate talent for making fun, wearable clothes for real world cool girls.
• Elsewhere, Vettese presented one of the most interesting and directional shows of the season, which melded Victorian sailor aesthetic with Y2K dance club culture.
• Kate Barton’s show was incredibly buzzy and lighthearted, full of fun trompe l’oeil prints and great sporty meets overtly girly styling.
• Melke presented another great collection utilizing creative upcycling and references to the midwest, featuring one incredibly iconic dress covered in antique fishing lures.
• Meruert Tolegan is a Kazakh designer that continues to pump out beautiful, ethereal tulle gowns and panniers worthy of a modern Marie Antoinette dream.
• Some of the pieces from Sandy Liang’s new collection, like the doll clothes-covered dress, were the strongest looks she’s created in years.
• Tara Babylon’s prints and patterns are some of the most joyful things we saw.
• Dauphinette’s imaginative show was so dreamlike and fantasy-inducing, featuring a gown full of beetles and upycled sequined and beaded corsets that rivaled what one might see on a couture runway.
• Caroline Zimbalist is doing some of the greatest work in the industry with natural materials.
• Pipenco is what the fashion world needs right now, and has mastered storytelling and structural, exciting silhouettes that keep us on our toes.

Collina Strada Had the Most Thought Provoking Show

There is sometimes nothing we want more than to feel and be provoked at fashion week, and luckily, Collina Strada was able to deliver that. For the spring 2026 collection, designer Hillary Taymour presented a series of models twins. Each couple walked the runway; one in light clothing with the other shadow following in dark looks. The designer quoted Carl Jung and stated that, “Beyond a shadow of a doubt, we are living in an era of crisis. Humanity’s darkest impulses no longer lurk in abstraction; they are taking concrete form. Our shadows walk among us. The shadow is the unruly double we repress. It is the part of us that thinks the unthinkable, harbors unspeakable desire. It is the wellspring of rage and fear, but also of ambition and creativity. Jung reminds us that to be whole we must integrate this hidden twin with the curated self we offer to the spotlight. We must befriend our shadow. Bedazzle it, even.”

Not only was it a visually stunning spectacle, it was a masterclass in creating discourse. Online, in one of my posts, commenters were very quick to perceive the show in a very different way than what designer Taymour intended. It made me think about the Museum at FIT and Valerie Steele’s new exhibition about fashion psychoanalysis.

During the press preview I asked her if she thought contemporary designers are thinking more about how their shows might be perceived in a digital-first world where everyone’s a critic online. Her answer? “You’re seeing it in a certain way on the screen. You see things like color and silhouette, but you don’t get much tactile value at all. And that’s something that may be problematic. Some dress scholars and some psychologists are talking about how people should try and focus sometimes a little more on how clothes feel on them and how the clothes make them feel, both in terms of sensation and emotion rather than entirely how they look in clothes. That might make for a less anxiety producing relationship with clothes. Because very often what you find, is if people feel unhappy in clothes, they’re unhappy about their body and they’re kind of transferring that to the clothes.” Maybe it didn’t entirely answer the exact question, but it’s very interesting theory to apply to how people are reacting to seeing new fashion collections online, especially when there’s a concept involved that goes way beyond surface level.

Anna Sui Is Essential for New York Fashion Week

Anna Sui consistently sends collections down the runway that embody her own distinct aesthetic while still creating a world that transports the viewer. She also always has the best front row that truly feels so personal and curated. This season, we couldn’t believe our eyes when we saw the iconic English designer Zandra Rhodes alongside Vera Wang, Marc Jacobs and Sofia Coppola.

With sun-faded lace, stunning rococo shoes, heart-shaped hair by Garren and so many incredibly details, Sui focused on the bohemian excess of DH Lawrence, the English author of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, who in 1919, ended up in Taos, New Mexico, at the Mabel Dodge Luhan ranch. “People like Georgia O’Keefe and Millicent Rogers came to stay with D.H. Lawrence and his new wife Frieda von Richthofen; she was mixing the Bohemian look with the Southwest,” contributed to the aesthetic, according to Sui. Every detail in an Anna Sui show feels thought-out and so special and rare–down to the venue; which this season, took place in the iconic Hotel Chelsea. She remains one of the rare, household designers who hasn’t bent to an overly sanitized, highly commercial aesthetic that so many of the big players in New York have committed to over the years.

Secret shows, anniversaries and big debuts

The New York Fashion Week spring 2026 season wrote its own headlines with so many designers celebrating anniversaries, debuts or secret shows. A few of our favorites:

• Willy Chavarria’s extremely intimate show at Printemps. Chavarria presented a selection of womenswear from his co-ed collection previously shown in Paris this summer and the strong point of view resonated through rare colors, strong silhouettes and an epic casting.
• Area’s new creative director Nicholas Aburn gave us a splashy, extremely exciting textural wonderland of dresses.
• Monse celebrated its 10th anniversary in Long Island City. The incredible ASMR-effect pearl skirt that clinked down the runway was a favorite.
• Zankov debuted its first runway show and it was one of the best hits of the season so far, full of stripes, sequins and visible joy–one of the ones we really can’t wait to watch.

The Prada Effect and Other Insider Observations

If you’re a European luxury fashion brand and you didn’t host an event during NYFW, who even are you? Valentino, Dior, Miu Miu, Prada, Chanel, Balenciaga and others all held major events during NYFW like never before. Which is a larger sign of the current state of the economy given the majority of the events focused on beauty and handbags.

• However, Prada Group essentially took over NYFW in more ways than one. Miu Miu hosted two events, one for its new fragrance and another for its collaboration with Coco Gauff. Likewise, Prada hosted two separate events, one beauty-centric and one fashion focused. Besides that, the Prada effect, which I already documented for Elle, is so very real. Prada is in the handful of top five designers that will always be replicated and referenced by other designers, but never more so than the present. It was impossible not to gawk at the Prada references made by many mainstream New York designers this season. Tory Burch’s intentionally wrinkled pieces and boxy, low-cut awkwardly-good proportions were beautiful and will likely sell incredibly well, but also felt so inherently Prada. There are so many other designers who heavily referenced Prada this season, it was shocking.
• Eloquii opened NYFW with a size inclusive show that didn’t get as much attention as it should have in an age where size inclusive runways are dead. The fits were excellent and incredibly respectful of the body–which sounds so essential and basic but is a real rarity in the world of runway. Take, for example, one plus size model at Off-White who had her dress ride up the whole length of the runway, revealing her entire crotch–completely avoidable and the total responsibility of the design team and stylist. It’s too often we see a larger body on the runway wearing something that clearly lacks basic fit, and it’s not okay. Eloquii’s clothing was lightly trendy and not earth-shatteringly groundbreaking–but it was real fashion for real people that looked comfortable, supportive and nice.
• UOVO (the storage unit company formerly known as Garde Robe) seems to be doing a massive publicity blitz as they collaborated to host the Monse show in their Long Island City location. They also collaborated with The RealReal to sell more Iris Apfel estate jewelry and clothing. As someone who already collects pieces from Iris Apfel and sells some of them too, the curation was excellent. I’ll post what I bought on Instagram soon.
• Fecal Matter and Amanda Lepore hosted the best event of New York Fashion Week Spring 2026, at Dover Street Market. It felt like real New York expressive weirdness, the crowd was iconic and it was mesmerizing and a true example of the authenticity and eccentricity this city represents. More of this, please.
• Alexander Wang had his “comeback” show and cancel culture in fashion will never not be a fascinating topic. I wrote about his first comeback show in 2023 here and whether or not its possible to actually cancel a fashion designer. Alongside the current Galliano revolution (especially supported by Gen Z) the answer seems to be a hard no.
• Balenciaga debuted Demna’s perfumes, and it’s one of the most exciting beauty launches I’ve seen all year. The packaging takes inspiration from vintage styles with a distressed twist and the scents don’t feel overly commercialized. They feel more niche and special, and it’s kind of cool that they’re keeping the nose (perfumer) of each scent (there were reportedly more than one) a secret.