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Wait…let me cook. Not to overwhelm you with internet speak, but walk with me on this one. Was the Autumn/Winter 2025 season the season of, as the kids say these days, ‘reheating nachos’?
While this piece of online parlance — a metaphor for when someone does something that’s been done before, most commonly used to compare pop stars’ careers — is already overused, it’s true that this season, the remixes were particularly memorable. As it pertains to fashion, the premise as I see it is simple: ‘reheating nachos’ equates to designers revisiting their own past collections, those from the house they currently design for or… someone else’s. References in art and design are common; what’s new is that fashion’s love for nostalgia has gotten so strong that rehashing the past is now a fully fledged business strategy — albeit one with varying degrees of success.
The harsh reality of the current luxury landscape is that new equals risky. It’s safer to lean into tried-and-true formulas than to place a wager — see the plethora of head-to-toe black looks on the runways or the amount of corporate inspo in collections, from classic business casual to power dressing. There was a time in which runways were a place for directional ideas rather than a parade of merely commercial propositions. This has changed now, which is not to say that commerce is the antithesis of creativity.
Getting references right
A recurring argument this season was how ‘same-y’ the collections felt from New York through Paris. It’s true — a quick scroll through Vogue Runway reveals most collections marketed to contain similar elements: a furry handbag, a curvaceous blazer, an oversized coat with a matching shawl, and even the same kind of The Row-adjacent ‘non-shoe’ footwear. Brands are looking across the aisle to be competitive at a time of financial difficulty. That is fair game, but the general consensus is that too much of fashion looks the same today, and, most poignantly, is geared towards the exact same consumer.
But it’s true that runways are now more visible than ever from a consumer’s standpoint, which presents a one-to-one merchandising opportunity. Dries Van Noten, for one, famously only showed what he sold, and Julian Klausner’s debut as the designer’s successor managed to effortlessly carry through that formula while providing something fresh.
Considering this season’s runways, some recipes are menu go-tos for a reason — they always hit the spot — and some dishes taste better the next day, or in the case of Saint Laurent, a couple of decades later. Consider Anthony Vaccarello’s mining of the Yves Saint Laurent archives with collections that can only be described as, to use more internet speak, hit after hit after hit. It certainly aids Vaccarello that the source material is the stuff of fashion legend, but what he’s accomplished by modernising everything from the 1961 Le Saharienne safari jacket to YSL’s iconic own personal look is remarkable.
This season, Vaccarello looked to Monsieur Saint Laurent’s early ’90s collections, the designer told Mark Holgate for Vogue Runway. As Holgate pointed out, this was a time in which YSL was considered démodé, his revolutionary ’80s shoulders and shocking colouring out of place in the grungier landscape of the ’90s. Vaccarello reimagined Saint Laurent’s silhouettes as fabulous mini coat dresses, and pencil skirt and blouse combos — rather than reheating anything, this was an effective experiment that proved the value of keeping familial recipes.
Similarly at Dior, Maria Grazia Chiuri offered a reimagination of John Galliano’s famous J’adore Dior T-shirt from the noughties, which is sure to be a bestseller considering how coveted the archival iterations are. And at Miu Miu, Miuccia Prada sent bullet bras down her runway under silky slips and blouses and thin knit sweaters. As Sarah Mower pointed out, Mrs Prada’s timely exploration of femininity as both an ineffable personal quality and as a changing accessory harkened back to her AW95 collection for Miu Miu. Thirty years later, the collection looked just as novel because Mrs Prada continues to find ways to reinvent the most classic and homogenous items in our wardrobe. “Looking around the guests at the show and the models on the runway, it’s clear that all this will come as completely fresh, as they weren’t even born in that century,” wrote Mower. “Nothing wrong with that. Miuccia Prada earned the right to quote herself years ago.”
There’s also the case of younger designers looking back at fashion history for inspiration. Harris Reed’s latest effort at Nina Ricci recalled Tom Ford’s Saint Laurent, most specifically his AW03 collection. Both line-ups featured similar négligé-like frocks paired with or under tailoring and fur stoles finished with silk ribbons. Reed’s instinct of reigniting this particular brand of dressiness feels timely, but the execution is perhaps too familiar. It must be said, however, that the collection was convincingly styled by editor extraordinaire Carine Roitfeld, who was a muse and consultant of Ford’s during that era.
Ch-ch-ch-changes
Donatella Versace’s departure from Versace’s creative helm perhaps best charts the path forward in this context. Donatella, a fashion icon in her own right, transformed the label and made it her own — sometimes in her own image — over the past close to three decades. The past few years had seen her reference her brother’s collections more directly, reinterpreting full line-ups and themes on her own runways. These were, in many cases, effective displays of the impact that Versace has had in fashion and culture over the years, and of how highly the label has been referenced. The AW25 collections were a prime stage for revisiting past recipes — not only has vintage remained at the forefront of the fashion conversation (Vogue’s April 2025 issue is vintage themed, and the magazine is hosting vintage markets in New York and London on 29 March), but the past has never felt more relevant as age-old houses welcome in new designers.
Alessandro Michele is giving the Valentino archives his own singular spin, and this season Sarah Burton found inspiration in Hubert de Givenchy’s first collection from 1952 for her debut at the house that carries his name. Givenchy is a brand most people don’t have much of a definition for these days. It’s a stand-in for a particular kind of old Hollywood elegance, thanks in large part to house muse Audrey Hepburn, but Burton’s predecessors seldom aligned themselves with this idea. What Burton had, really, was a blank canvas — no leftovers left in the microwave to reheat. She delivered something fresh by keeping her references minimal — namely a mini version of the archival remake Elle Fanning wore to the Oscars — and charting a path forward with curvaceous tailoring and lots of covetable cocktailwear. It was the better received debut at Givenchy in the past decade, and the most promising, which also saw Clare Waight Keller (2017) and Matthew Williams (2020).
Haider Ackermann’s debut at Tom Ford was a particularly enticing possibility going into the season. Ackermann, a beloved ‘designer’s designer’ was getting a fresh start on the runway, while the label had found a new way forward after a false start under Peter Hawkins, Mr Ford’s former second in command whose two-season experiment at the helm was too much of a ‘greatest hits’ look back. (Sometimes reheated nachos don’t conserve their flavour, unfortunately.) Ackermann’s debut was critically lauded; it felt both sexy in the Mr Ford way and seductive like Ackermann’s clothes often do — it spoke to elegance, a particular preoccupation of late, with a point of view grounded in maturity and sensuality. The hints at Mr Ford’s past — say, a call back to the micro-belting in his Gucci collections — were sparse, to his credit.
The key element that rendered Ackermann’s debut a success was that it felt new. What has made ‘nacho reheating’ the conversation topic dujour online is that, across all aspects of culture, consumers are fatigued by the constant referencing and rehashing. Newness, after all, is what drives the industry forward.
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