Fashion, by its very nature, is all about new beginnings. It thrives on the promise of the now and the thrill of the next; on the tension between what we think we want and what we’re about to be told we need. It is an industry permanently in rehearsal for reinvention, forever clearing its throat, adjusting the lighting, cueing the overture. This year will be remembered for many things, but in fashion terms, it will go down as the Great Reset – a moment when the system blinked, stuttered, and quietly admitted that business is not as usual.
There have been changes at almost every major house – Chanel, Dior, Fendi, Loewe, Gucci, Bottega Veneta, Versace, you name it – with 16 designers rebooting 15 labels in September alone. Creative directors arrived bearing moodboards, manifestos and carefully worded press releases about “listening” and “heritage,” while departing designers were thanked profusely for their “vision” before being quietly folded into fashion folklore. Blink, and you missed an entire chapter.
Beyond the runway, the tectonic plates have also been shifting. The way fashion is sold has fractured (RIP Ssense), the way it’s consumed has looped backwards (hello, vintage fairs, archive hunting and the rental economy), and the way it’s written about has atomised into a thousand Substacks, each with its own thesis, tone and PayPal link. Trends now rise and fall at TikTok speed – micro, nano, post-ironic – disappearing quicker than you can say Labubu. Meanwhile, social media has become a kind of gladiatorial arena: artificial intelligence flexing its uncanny muscles, hot takes masquerading as critique, the occasional conspiracy theory gaining suspicious traction, and the exhausting rigmarole of influencer culture grinding on.
Looking ahead, what will 2026 bring? Before we go any further, it’s worth taking a pinch of salt. These are not commandments handed down from the mountaintop of trend forecasting, but instincts – some sharpened by observation, others by intuition, all shaped by the strange recalibrations of the past year. Fashion, after all, remains an unpredictable beast: allergic to certainty, resistant to logic, and most alive precisely when it’s busy proving everyone wrong.
If you’re not on Substack, the question isn’t where have you been? so much as what have you been reading? 2025 marked the rise of the copy-first platform – a return to words, ideas and points of view – to the extent that even Charli XCX joined the orange app, publishing essays that puncture the fourth wall of pop stardom. Readership has soared, and longform writing is once again being circulated and debated with the fervour once reserved for It-novels (arguably, I am biased, having launched my own stack, Private Parts, last month).
At the same time, fashion’s commentariat has expanded. Historians, theorists and pop-culture critics now flood social media with content that feels like a conscious antidote to brain-rot: context over clickbait, research over hauls, thinking over selling. Audiences are responding because it feels good to be intellectually fed – to learn something new rather than scroll through someone else’s holiday. Brands are engaging intellects to explain their heritage – from Alexander McQueen’s online tutorials with Professor Alistair O’Neill, to accounts like South Asia Archive offering history lessons illustrated by archival imagery.
