What to Read, Watch, and Listen to—According to the Fall 2026 Shows

“[Harunobu Murata], the Jil Sander alum, had spent this season thinking about Adolf Loos’s Ornament and Crime, a modernist manifesto which posits that for culture to evolve ornamentation should be eliminated from useful objects.” —Ashley Ogawa Clarke

“This season, [Bellotti] said he was looking at the Swedish photographer Anders Petersen’s black-and-white pictures of Café Lehmitz, a bar in Hamburg, Germany’s red-light district circa the late 1960s. He was taken with the intimate images of its patrons, ‘the way they’re close to each other, and this kind of distortion that you will see in the collectsion: some suits come up in a way that’s a bit wrong, the collar looks like it’s falling in the back, the shoulders on a dress are detached from the body—they’re like clothes they want to run away from.’” —Nicole Phelps

“‘I’ve always been fascinated by scarecrows,’ Skelton said after the show, citing his obsession with a ’90s photography book by Colin Garratt. ‘Some of them are really beautiful and elegant with great coats, and some have this sinister feel. There’s a weird duality where they can feel kitsch and then also quite evil, as if they could spring to life all of a sudden.’ ” —Liam Hess

“The starting point was Andy Warhol’s book The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again), where he writes that everyone has a certain aura until they open their mouth. ‘I really love Warhol’s thinking,’ Kegels said in a preview. ‘It’s quite funny and it’s true. We live in a very public time where everything is visible. So I wanted to explore how your clothes can shield the real you.’” —Lucy Maguire

“[Taro Horiuchi] had recently been taken with the 2019 movie The Lighthouse and the epic story of Moby Dick and decided to wrangle their themes of fear, mystery, and seaworthy bravery into this cleverly nautical collectsion chock-full of storytelling.” —Ashley Ogawa Clarke

The collectsion was “titled ‘Mine Eyes’ after Shakespeare’s Sonnet 43.” —Amy Verner

“[Yuka Kimura] had also been thinking about Kafka’s Metamorphosis and the role that Gregor Samsa is famously forced to play when he wakes up as an insect and must still go to work.” —Ashley Ogawa Clarke

“What fascinated Pauline Dujancourt while reading Swiss writer Mona Chollet’s 2022 book In Defense of Witches: The Legacy of the Witch Hunts and Why Women Are Still on Trial last year was the women’s sense of sisterhood—the fact that many ‘witches’ throughout history were killed essentially for being part of an all-female community.” —Liam Hess

“A recent reading of Giovanni’s Room, the 1956 novel by James Baldwin, about a white American man in Paris coming to terms with his homosexuality, prompted Anthony Vaccarello’s latest Saint Laurent men’s collectsion. ‘I was kind of obsessed by the story, the mood, and imagining a character caught between desire and disgust,’ Vaccarello explained backstage.” —Nicole Phelps

“[Kronthaler] said his mix was inspired by the costumes in Pier Paolo Pasolini’s 1972 film adaptation of The Canterbury Tales, along with the aura and beauty of his fellow Austrian, Romy Schneider.” —Luke Leitch

“We had this idea about going through our archive and throwing all the garments in the air and having them fall and kind of explode in a way and in slow motion and that it kind of was about, I guess, letting go…. We were so interested in that idea of falling and it made us think a bit more about Alice in Wonderland, which we rewatched.” —Laird Borrelli-Persson

“Di Felice said backstage that the idea for the presentation had come from his rewatching ‘of one of my favorite Chantal Akerman films, Je Tu il Elle. She’s considered one of the first queer francophone movie makers of the 1970s. The movie’s set in Brussels and follows a young lady through her day.’” —Sarah Mower

“A frosty staircase in the middle of a snowy forest was the theatrical entrance of the Dsquared2 sports-inspired fall runway. It was a clear nod to the Winter Olympics, which are about to take place here in Milan and Cortina in just a few weeks, and also an homage to the smash-hit series Heated Rivalry (one of its protagonists, Hudson Williams, made his runway debut opening the show).” —Alberto Calabrese

“Nouchi titled the collectsion Alien after the sci-fi horror movie franchise he wasn’t allowed to watch as a child. ‘I heard the sounds in my room of the screams and the slime, and I was terrified. So I had nightmares of this movie before seeing it,’ he said.” —Ashley Ogawa Clarke

“Last year was quite chaotic; everything happening at the same time…. And then I had to run back to China and New York and Paris because we had the showroom there back and forth. So I spent a lot of time in transportation, especially in cars, and whenever I’m sitting inside of [one] it kind of reminds me of urban isolations. And then there’s Jonathan Glazer’s movie, Under the Skin, where it’s like an outsider or a traveler, which is an alien’s interpretation of what a femininity is, what a human being’s life on earth is. So that kind of made me think about the interpretation of what femininity is, which is what we always do anyway.” —Laird Borrelli-Persson

“Knowing that Alexander McQueen found inspiration in movies, Seán McGirr looked to one of his personal favorites, Todd Haynes’s 1995 film, Safe, as a starting point for fall. ‘I wanted to address the psychological conflict that I think is happening right now in the sense that we’re always on, always curating. There’s this idea of paranoia and perfection,’ he said.” —Nicole Phelps

“Alessandro Dell’Acqua kicked off his show flipping the usual runway logic; the models walked out in the finale lineup at the very beginning rather than at the end. The trick, he explained, was borrowed from 8½ by Federico Fellini, where the parade in the closing scene isn’t meant as a conclusion but as a carnival of vanities. ‘And so, the film ends? No, that’s how it begins,’ goes the exchange between Guido Anselmi (Marcello Mastroianni) and Claudia (Claudia Cardinale).” —Tiziana Cardini

“We were really thinking about the lighting in Suspiria and Dario Argento’s lighting and his use of primary color. And that was really exciting to us for some reason with the collectsion…. It was really fun to work with just these really strong red tones and blue tones.” —Laird Borrelli-Persson

“With local band Wedding playing live and loud, Madsen and Clante’s show acted like a kind of cleansing ritual. ‘We called the collectsion Ghostly Matters, and I think that it came from this idea that the present is haunted by futures that we promised but we can no longer believe in,’ said Madsen, who added that the idea was to exorcise the ghosts and their power over us by materializing them.” —Laird Borrelli-Persson

“‘What Loverboy stands for,’ he said as his friend’s band Baby Berserk finished sound check and before the line of people outside started pouring in, ‘is this sort of queer, Scottish, pagan availablism….’ Availablism, Jeffrey explained, ‘is from the 1970s no-wave movement in New York; it means finding beauty in things around you.’” —Nicole Phelps

“The show opened at an energetic pace but in dim light and with a somberness that was enhanced by the soundtrack, LCD Soundsystem’s ‘American Dream.’” —Laird Borrelli-Persson

“To the sound of ‘Libertango’ by Astor Piazzolla, the models articulated dramatic mood swings—throwing coats to the floor, casting sideway glances at the phone-holding audience, fleeing as if pursued, mooching as if rejected.” —Luke Leitch

“Kamara sketched a deep dive of his own that had seen him visit the Miles Davis archive in LA, speak to family members, and view some of Davis’s clothes. All this, he said, supplied him with some fashion melodies to riff on: ‘You’re cutting and pasting, and then you create a rhythm for yourself.’ Throughout his life, Davis’s look metamorphosed as much as his music. With such an enormous catalogue of cool to consider, Kamara narrowed his focus to Davis’s 1970s and ’80s period, starting with Bitches Brew. Some of the womenswear was also inflected by Kamara’s research into Betty Davis, Miles’s creative and influential second wife.” —Luke Leitch

“As guests queued up outside the French embassy to go through security, passports at the ready, there certainly was a sense that the fashion pack was on a big school trip. The theme continued on the runway, where streetcast models—alongside Ella Emhoff, who opened the show, and the French musician, Oklou [above], who gave a live performance—represented different characters you’d find in a classroom.” —Emily Chan

“Some of these high-octane looks might be fitting for the life of a showgirl, and that was the point: Hudson was greatly inspired by the world of opera singers in this collectsion. ‘I’m a huge opera fan—I was listening to a lot of it while designing,’ he said. Fittingly, at the end of the show, Aretha Franklin’s triumphant version of ‘Nessun Dorma’ played on the speakers.” —Christian Allaire

“Soundtracked by the haunting vocals of Nepali singer Varsha Thapa [above], the intimate candlelit setting was reflective of a simplicity that is at the heart of Danish culture.” —Emily Chan

“We were at the Dojo de Paris. The giant room had been tricked out like a New York intersection, complete with crosswalk stripes, a telephone booth, a convertible Cadillac Coupe DeVille (that’s a guess), and, more oddly, a couple of apartments’ worth of furniture. The beds were for the performers Mon Laferte and Lunay, who played out a love affair gone sour (that’s another guess; my Spanish is lousy) as models crisscrossed the stage. Santos Bravos, a boy band born from a Latin American search contest show that’s about to go pop, was among the other acts. All the performers were Latin, and all are friends of Chavarria, the designer pointed out.” —Nicole Phelps