We will get to Sia Arnika’s dual temperature fall 2026 collection in a minute, which was one of her very best, in the sense that it was both cool and hot at the same time, what with its cinched jackets exploding with volume, sporty bodysuit dresses with train backs, and slinky, bias-cut floor length skirts. Before that though let’s talk about the current predilection for the doomy, dystopian pre-show music that was playing at her show, and indeed which has played at many others, in Berlin and beyond; a kind of nagging, incessant electronic sighing which if you were selecting it on your iPhone to wake you up in the morning would be called something like Existential Dread. Arnika had it on repeat as we waited for her show to start, with the occasional burst of an unanswered phone endlessly ringing, before exploding, as the show began, into a fantastic, throbbing soundtrack (she works with a DJ called Europa) which included samples of the storming 1989 club classic “Ride on Time” by Black Box: the unnerving and enervating suddenly switching to the upbeat and euphoric.
All this music talk might seem like a bit of a diversion, but really, it’s not, for the journey that Arnika took to realize this collection, she explained post-show, wasn’t so very different, something she discussed with her usual humor-inflected candor: The determination to go from down to up. “Last year, I was a bit overwhelmed, because it’s difficult to be in the fashion industry, especially now,” Arnika said, “and recently I just wanted to have a good time, basically. So, this collection, it really has this end of the week feeling; the anticipation of going out. I wouldn’t say it is exactly T.G.I.F.,” she went on to say, laughing, “but yeah, it is.”
The great thing about Arnika is the way she designs both cerebrally and intuitively, the conceptualism colored with the subjective. It always feels like she comes from a place of absolute honesty, including about herself and her motivations as a designer, and this season the intention felt clearer and her ideas more distilled and fully realized. She was thinking about the idea of how work clothes could morph into going-out clothes: the neatly pressed shirt which suddenly becomes a romper; the cardigan with its frayed, tattered edges, part of the collection’s extensive fabric manipulation; the office pants transformed by silvered seams which glimmer in the light; and the preponderance of faux fur tails which swished from not only the clothes but the weighty black leather workwear boots that grounded so many of her looks. “They started a couple of years ago as headpieces, and I just thought,” Arnika said, “that when you see a girl walking down the street with them, you’re going to notice her, you know? That she’s fierce.” You can’t argue with that.
