The top 12 trends of the fall 2025 season—which range from cozy to cubist and are designed for work and play—somehow manage to navigate smoothly through a time as distorted as a reflection in a funhouse mirror. It’s not that designers are burying their heads in the sand, “You know, it’s in the air, this sort of darkness,” said R13’s Chris Leba, summing up the general mood. It’s no surprise, then, that many collections had a Gothic or Emo sensibility that acknowledged this vibe.
Fight or flight is the instinctual response to fear, and resistance was one of the rallying cries of the season (note the many references to armor). Some designers substituted escapism for physical retreat, conjuring free-flying birds or referencing the comforts of home where you can pull the covers over your head for a little while. Clothes that can cocoon and embrace their wearers were all over the runways, as were soft textures—most notably and inexplicably faux fur—which can activate an ASMR response. Yet if the season were to be personified, it would be as an iron hand in a velvet glove, as control and comfort are contraposed.
At a time when the manosphere is ascendent, power and the female body (or “the accessories of femininity” as Miuccia Prada put it) have become lighting rods. It wasn’t so long ago that women were excluded from the world of work. When they started climbing the corporate ladder in the 1980s—the era that underpins so much of what we are seeing now—they often borrowed from “the boys.” Tailoring, neckties, and linebacker shoulders are back and as big as ever. And concurrent with the fizzling out of Work From Home, the TikTok generation has become fascinated with Dress for Success uniforms, and Working Girl’s Tess McGill, spawning the terms corpcore and office siren.
Sirens are enchanters, and for fall, designers have once again fallen for the hourglass curves of yesteryear. Mae West’s hourglass silhouette inspired Schiaparelli’s Shocking perfume bottle (which in turn influenced Jean Paul Gaultier’s flacons), all torsos that closely resemble a Stockman mannequin, i.e. perfection. With Ozempic in play, beauty ideals seem to be retreating to old standards where traditionally small waists represented discipline and hips (augmented with pads or peplums for fall), fecundity. While some designers sculpted silhouettes, others celebrated the female form by draping the natural body using clothing with no (visible) supports, much like Christo and Jeanne-Claude transformed architectural monuments with cloth. For those simply looking to be immortalized in street style, a touch of neon should do the trick.
Much more poetic are the Byronic touches at the neck–cravats, jabots, and flounces—which seem to reference the dandism that’s on the collective fashion mind in light of the upcoming Costume Institute exhibition. The Romantics found correspondence between emotions and nature; the outdoors that creatives had top of mind for fall was the British countryside, as fictionalized in Brideshead Revisited, or Saltburn, and captured in pictures of royals being horsey at Balmoral.
It’s not horses, but rumors that have been running wild in the fashion industry. Some designers have transferred that idea of self-interest to their craft, creating clothes that “wear clothes” or that reference the process of design. “We need to find pleasure in what we’re doing every day, in the concrete world of creating clothes, but also by looking at things differently,” said Gauchere’s Marie-Christine Statz. One way designers are changing things up is by playing with depth and collage, creating Cubist-like constructs that ask us to perceive the body in unfamiliar and exciting new ways. “You cannot fight chaos with chaos,” said Luca Magliano, but the fall trends seem to suggest you can counter it with craft.
For Christian Dior, whose wasp-waisted, round-hipped New Look silhouette changed the course of fashion history, beauty was quite literally a construct. “I wanted my dresses to be constructed like buildings, molded to the curves of the female form, stylizing its shape,” said the would-be architect. Today, Ozempic and Skims make shape-shifting a DIY activity. Demonstrating that they are on hand to help, designers showed any number of looks that followed the shape of a Stockman mannequin, with curves in all the obvious places. Some broadened the hips with padding, while others used peplums to emphasize the waist/hip differential.
The post-Covid work from home days are long gone. For some seasons now, designers have been leaning on Working Girl’s Tess McGill as a guide to corporate attire, resurrecting the power shouldered suit from her late ’80s wardrobe, and throwing in Gordon Gekko and Patrick Bateman ties for good measure. The reappearance of these emblems of male authority might speak to the feeling of powerlessness many feel. Fake it ’til you make it, right?
If excitement had a hue it would certainly be neon, which speaks in all caps, with exclamation points. Neon colors crossed over from safety gear to fashion in the bigger-is-better-and-brighter 1980s, with the help of Stephen Sprouse and Fiorucci. The fluorescents that walked the runway for fall weren’t retro, though; instead their stand-out visual impact seems custom made for grabbing attention in our image saturated digital world.
The world is in a scary place and designers were feeling it keenly this season, making like The Smiths and wearing “black on the outside” to reflect how they “feel on the inside.” Nosferatu and Siouxsie Sioux were on mood boards along with references to Goth and Emo cultures. Leave it to Rick “Lord of Goth” Owens to send “dracucollars” down the runway.
Fashion’s fascination with all things British—Mods and Marquesses, Brideshead and the Sex Pistols—is well documented. This season punks took a backseat to royals—notably the late Queen Elizabeth II at Balmoral—as fashion took the equestrian look out for a trot. Heritage fabrics (tweed, herringbone, plaid) were prevalent, and country house staples like barn jackets, macs, and rubber boots were everywhere, along with scarf-wrapped heads.
While New York is marking the 20th anniversary of Christo and Jeanne-Claude’s Gates project in Central Park with an AR experience, designers seem to be referencing the artists’ wrapping effects, using draped and pleated materials to create monuments of the female form.
Junya Watanabe’s trench coat is like a 2D Picasso painting come to life, taking up space in unexpected and exciting ways. Watanabe wasn’t the only designer thinking of garments and the clothed body in new ways. Viktor Rolf deflated their couture silhouettes and Courrèges’s Nicolas Di Felice worked folds with sexy dexterity. The Cubists tried to make sense of the rapidly changing world by finding new ways of looking, using flatness, differing perspectives, and found materials. We might have swapped pixels for cubes, but we’re still searching for understanding.
If the solitary gentleman in Caspar David Friedrich’s “Wanderer Above the Sea of Fog,” a peak Romantic Movement painting, turned around, he’d most likely be wearing a cravat or frill, as a gentleman in 1817 was wont to do. The Romantics embraced the forces of nature over the forces of reason, and though the era passed and new philosophies were touted, it survives in sartorial flourishes like ruffled shirts and expressive jabots. Designers revived these for fall along with the Pierrot collar and the neck ruff, perhaps as a reminder to keep a cool head amidst the surrounding chaos.
Like the Narcissus of myth, fashion tends towards self-obsession. This season that quality manifested in garments that referenced the elements of a piece of clothing or how it was made. So a Thom Browne coat “had on” a dress, while at Duran Lantink and All-In clothes seem to be displayed on the body rather than worn over it. Elsewhere there were shirts that became skirts and four-armed sweaters. What does it all mean? We know the industry has to change systematically. On the individual level we need designers who dare. Fixation on the bottom line won’t move fashion forward, but a passion for craft and a clear vision can.
Flying is perhaps the ultimate expression of freedom, and one that’s off-limits to wingless humans. But fashion can make the imagination soar. Two thousand paper cranes decorated the set at Thom Browne, and at Jun Takahashi’s Undercover, avians and angels descended in pairs, one black, one white; hatchlings took flight at Marni and Luar as well. Maybe the message is that we can find solace in solidarity. You know the saying: Birds of a feather flock together.
The alarming news cycle has many of us wanting to pull the covers over our heads. As if channeling that urge, designers have incorporated elements from interiors, particularly bedrooms, into their designs. Let’s call it sleepcore. At Louis Vuitton models carried blankets or wore clothes made out of them, duvet dresses showed up at Versace, and diaphanous nightgowns wafted down the catwalk at Chloé. Taking the idea further, Prada promoted a pre-wrinkled lived-in look to put you at ease.
The amount of “fur”—made of shearling, fiber, or more often than not, man-made materials—that walked down the runways this season was positively hair-raising. The spectrum of possibilities goes from tame, close-cropped, low pile “teddy” furs to more wild, Yeti-like options.
