Sex, Fringe, and Newspapers

The Grateful Dead’s Jerry Garcia certainly was referring to the mystery of human existence when he wrote that line, but he very well could have been talking about the wild and wonderful spring-summer 2026 fashion season, which wrapped up earlier this month. The month-long, four-city excursion was most notable for its surfeit of debuts from creative directors at a dizzying list of bold-faced brands — Demna at Gucci, Jonathan Anderson at Dior, Simone Bellotti at Jil Sander, Dario Vitale at Versace, Louise Trotter at Bottega Veneta, Mattieu Blazy at Chanel to name just a few — but beneath those news-making shows was the underpinning of any fashion week: great clothes.

Now that the dust has settled, we can look at where the chips have fallen. A lot was attempted; not all of it was successful. And big and beautiful statements about how we will soon be dressing were made. We need protection from the world and to eschew the banality of good taste. Designers embraced the canal heat of unbridled sex and the bristling energy of long strands of playful fringe. Here’s what we saw that we suspect will make the leap from the runway and, eventually, into your closet.

We live in an age where so much of life is experienced as two-dimensional pixels trapped behind a smooth, unfeeling glass screen. Frozen pictures or short clips serve as a simulacrum of the unwieldy, bristling strum and drang of tangible, palpable life. Fashion, of course, is a practice that is meant to be alive with tactility, with sweeping dynamism, with movement and texture. This season, designers embraced that three-dimensionality and sense of gesticulation by wonderfully deploying one of fashion’s great ornamentations: flirty, fabulous, fantastical fringe.

It hung and fluttered like celebratory streamers from a brown silk minidress at Ferragamo and was a firework explosion of smudgey color rippling across an alien-like gown at Louis Vuitton. It trailed across the abdomen, hanging from a midriff woven top at McQueen, and flitted across the hem of a yee-haw Polo Ralph Lauren suede skirt. Everyone went wild for Alaïa’s frisky knee-high boots adorned with fringe that swooshed and swung with each tantalizing step. No matter how it was employed, it was undeniably kinetic — adding swells and ripples across the topographical human form it covered, a reminder that fashion is an art in motion, a celebration of the body as it moves through the world!

Even before the legendary and iconic (<---one of the few times those adjectives are actually legit) designer Giorgio Armani passed away in September, the sweeping, poetic nature of his work was cresting in the fashion world. It makes total sense — we are all still trying to make sense of a post-COVID landscape, of trying to balance the ease and comfort of pandemic life with the more formal requirements and get-on-with-it obligations of the dreaded and prolonged return-to-office orders.

Mr. Armani’s work is the blueprint. The structural, tradition-minded formality of the enduring suit, but rendered with a fluidity and ease that makes it feel akin to donning a pair of pajamas. In recent seasons, the suit has been embraced by designers, but infused with that very spirit — an ease, a luxurious loucheness and undone ease that is unmistakably and instantly recognizable as ARMANI.

That tension — ceremony vs. insouciance — was a leitmotif of the season, tweaked and updated by various designers. The unfussy elegance of a double-breasted jacket and loose pants (with a shirt and polka-dot tie) at Ferragamo, wide-lapelled and pleated at Versace (very 80s), boxy and hulking at Stella McCartney. Fear of God, the newest menswear fascination Auralee, Willy Chavarria, and LVMH prizewinner Soshiotsuki have all dabbled with the romantic folds and oversized, relaxed grace that was a hallmark of Mr. Armani’s oeuvre. It is a reminder that great ideas cycle in and out of the zeitgeist, that we are creatures of nostalgia and longing for an idealized moment of the past. That great design, indeed, never goes out of style.

Of course, the best Armani take was the post-mortem from the man himself. His final show — couples sent down in his signature liquid tailoring and glistening eveningwear in greige and navy — was a masterclass in discernment, elegance, unwavering belief in beauty and craft. The man may be gone, but his design legacy will undoubtedly live on.

It goes without saying that we live in trying times. The world is cold and often unfeeling. Outright violent. We need garments that protect, that serve as a barrier to the trials and tribulations surrounding us. We need clothes that fortify, that make a statement on our resilience, our toughness, on the hopeful act of persevering in the face of so much shock and suffering. We need things that transmit a sense of ineffable cool, yes, but also are defensive. We need garments that are badass, lawless, just a touch dangerous.

In other words, we need a leather jacket.

Saint Laurent showed its voluminous, line-baker coats with starched blouses with unmovable pussy bows, while Louis Trotter’s first outing at Bottega Veneta featured shapely, hourglass silhouettes crafted to look like exotic skins or rendered in the grooved plaitwork of its signature intretaccio weave. Absolutely dripping with braggadocio and erotic disobedience. Dario Vitale’s Versace debut, meanwhile, featured jackets with an unmistakable ‘80s sleaze baked into them, and Demna’s Gucci featured leather jackets with kitschy floral appliques, a scaly snakeskin appearance, and a slightly forlorn vintage cast. Meanwhile, Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez at Loewe topped their breezy sportswear with molded leather that was spongy and eccentric; Joseph Altuzarra sent out voluminous swing-style coats with high collars and an architectural structure.

To see so many leather jackets proposed for spring was a bit perplexing, yes, but it was also a reminder that there are few better ways to be both ballsy and safeguarded than to don one of these rugged stalwarts.

There is a certain cocooning simplicity to many of the designs today, a feeling of reductiveness or glacial austerity. Simple lines, nondescript colors, elegant and reserved details — minimalism is the reigning movement of the moment.

This season brought a shift. Minimalism isn’t going away by any means, it’s merely evolving. For the spring collections, designers sent out their beautifully bare propositions down the runway, but imbued with the unexpected zing and vigor of ravishing, vivifying COLOR. Indeed, colorful minimalism — looks that marry the pared-back ethos of streamlined classicism with the joy-inducing vigor of rich, voluptuous hues — were an exciting and much-welcomed development.

It was beautifully expressed at Simone Bellotti’s first outing at Jil Sander, in the primary color knit sweaters over contrasting base layers, colorblocking the body into childlike fields of penetrating cyan or inky navy like some Barnett Newman painting. Designer Zane Lii, of Lii, took a sporty approach with buoyant activewear that was then turned into a lesson on color combining (think: a romantic pink anorak pulled over a white top paired with a black skirt with a red waistband or layered T-shirts of sky blue, brown, black, and white). At Loewe, easily draped dresses featured hints of orange, fuchsia, emerald, or lemon in their rippling folds. Colleen Allen’s meditative clothes with a historical bent often come in ravishing shades of purple or marigold. Next spring, embrace rigor, embrace elegance, but do so with the life-affirming delight of bold, brash, beautiful color.

In recent seasons, clothing has become bloodless — designs that cover, consume, conceal the body beneath. This season was something of an about-face, an embrace of hedonism, of lust, of fashion as a conduit for the most basic human desire — SEX. Clothes got skimpy, revealing, fell off the body, pants buttons were left undone, and flies unzipped. Here, designers said, is a body in heat, here is the promise of sin, here is a hint of carnality, of luridness that makes your clothes magically fall away.

This is no doubt a response to the suffocating, cerebral energy of dreaded Quiet Luxury, with its emphasis on good taste and a sangfroid demeanor. It’s also a rejoinder to modern life, where connections are created through antiseptic, chilly phone screens. Instead, sex is a promise of sweat on skin, of the messiness of the human body, of joy, of lusty pleasure.

Demna, known for his hulking, oversized clothes at Balenciaga, reveled in vampy cuts and body-revealing proportions for his first Gucci collection. Fausto Puglisi injected a trashy, lamé glamour in his Roberto Cavalli collection, all low-cut tops and hip-revealing cutouts. At McQueen, there were bumster-cut jeans and skirts, practically slipping off the pelvis (the designer told Vogue he wanted to convey a feeling of “fertility, and strong female energy”), while Haider Ackermann’s sophomore Tom Ford collection was filled with transparent lace, bra tops, and body-skimming dresses that revealed more than they concealed.

Sex, sin, lust, heat. If these designers have their way, next summer will be HORNY. And we’re here for it.

Perhaps you, like me, are yearning for simpler times, when there was an accepted, singular notion of truth, and where every bit of news wasn’t delivered in ping-ping-ping alerts or 10-second snippets of video being blared at you from all directions.

Designers, too, must be missing these bygone days as newspapers were something of a small but telling leitmotif in the spring collections. There was the obvious way it was transformed into a newspaper print dress at Moschino (a notable update from a beloved Galliano-Dior design), or the models who clutched leather, intrecciato-woven newspapers along with their capacious bags at Bottega Veneta. In New York, designer Brandon Maxwell equipped some of his bags with small outer straps into which the daily Times was tucked, a literary posture that lets everyone know you do, in fact, keep up with the news.

There’s something undeniably wistful, nostalgic, a touch quixotic about the longing for the pulp-and-ink romance of a life where you can, in fact, find time to read the paper. Perhaps these small, meaningful gestures will inspire all of us to stop scrolling and remember the joys of reading in print.

While on the subject of sex (see above), not all sex is so … overt. Sometimes sex is about the seduction, a brush of a hand, an under-the-breath giggle, and, crucially, the merest glimpse of skin. Of course, our greatest fashion minds acknowledge this and addressed it in a way that’s so shrewd, so utterly savvy, it’s borderline genius.

Perforations! But of course!

With these small, orderly piercings and punctures, designers found a suggestive solution, a way to be both sensual and respectable, the greatest of tensions. A way to hint at the flesh beneath a garment, at a way to merely tease at the body within. It’s an airy delight proposed for summer months, it's an engaging way to explore new realms of pattern and texture, and most impactful of all, it’s oh-so-tantalizing, proof that the promise of sex can sometimes be more thrilling than the act itself.

It showed up in many ways, like a hole-ridden slim-fitting base knit at Eckhaus Latta, or a chunkier, ventilated sweater at the preppy-chic TWP. Ackermann equipped his slick coats and bags in sumptuous shades of green and burgundy with thousands of little provocative slits that opened up — almost as if breathing — as the models moved. There was a ventilated blue leather jacket at Fendi covered in delicately placed holes, and Miu Miu knits festooned with small gashes. At Schiaparelli, the holes were a bit more, let's say, overt, a play on polka-dots that were made with openwork cutouts that revealed — the reveled in — the human form, without ever veering toward crass.

And it’s in that tension — the revealing and the concealing, the overt and the implied — that the seductive nature of perforations gets its undeniable power.

Like a tangy jolt of citrus that cuts through the treacly sweetness in a dessert, a glaring streak of shocking color can instantly create drama, intrigue, excitement, and even a touch of joy. It’s for that very reason that screeching, look-at-me, acid green kept showing up in the spring collections.

With its hi-vis, fluorescent, traffic-stopping appearance, acid green is an instant remedy to the snoozy, refined sea of black, navy, gray, and beige in which we swim. It’s the perfect dash of bad taste, of daring, of attention-demanding self-assurance needed to exist in our world that asks to stay in line and not stick out. It is the color of Main Character Energy. It has an aggressive panache and is just the right amount of gauche.

It manifested as a netted bodysuit at Diotima, a wince-inducing dress at Prada, a patchwork trapeze frock with a gathered neck at Dries Van Noten, and an asymmetrical skirt adorned with tassels at Alaïa. It adds a lightning bolt of undeniable verve into an outfit, a double-take-worthy shock of tawdry glamour. It is no wonder in our smooth-brained days of staring at endless homogenous images we crave such chromatic thrills and enticements. Acid green demands attention, requires perception. It dares onlookers to glance away. They won’t be able to.

Max Berlinger is a writer based in New York City. He writes the fashion Substack Add 2 Cart.