The AW26 fashion month was a particularly fascinating season across the “Big Four” fashion capitals: New York, London, Milan, and Paris. Each city offered its own perspective:
Beautiful gowns, striking performances, and elaborate style were abundant — as they always are during fashion month. Yet, this season also carried something that we all cherish and nurture: nostalgia.
Fashion has always drawn inspiration from the past.
However, AW26 collections did not merely reference earlier decades or revive familiar silhouettes all over again. This season was about something more elusive. Many designers seemed not only to borrow from the past, but return to it. From the autobiographical reflection of fashion designer Tolu Coker in London to the culturally rooted references in Adrian Appiolaza’s Moschino and the revival of provocative glamour at Gucci under Demna, designers repeatedly turned to memory as both aesthetic material and an emotional reference point. As if fashion wanted to hold time still, playing with both personal memories and collective longing for what we often imagine as “better times.”
Nostalgia is often romanticised in modern culture. It has become both an aesthetic word and an emotional language through which we process the uncertainties of the present.
The word itself originates from Greek: nóstos (homecoming) and álgos (pain/longing). The philosopher Jeff Malpas explains nostalgia as a philosophical mood representing a painful longing to return home (nóstos + álgos), functioning as an existential reaction to modern instability. It emerges when we feel displaced, reflecting a "strangeness" in our everyday existence.
Long treated as a decorative gesture in fashion, nostalgia began to feel like something deeper this season.
Contemporary psychological research describes nostalgia as a complex emotional resource that helps people navigate the present through the memory of the past. Autobiographical memories, self-reflection and emotional regulation allow us to revisit meaningful personal experiences and reinterpret them through a more positive lens. Although nostalgia carries a bittersweet quality, it actually restores a sense of continuity in the self and provides comfort in moments of emotional tension.
homecoming
pain/longing
In light of this, nostalgia functions as a coping mechanism – a buffer that softens the discomfort of the present. Fashion, as a cultural practice that translates emotions into visual form, becomes one of the spaces where this idea takes shape. Therefore, within fashion, nostalgia can act almost like a metaphysical condition: a way of keeping the past alive within the present.
For many viewers, this season did not evoke the familiar reaction of “I’ve seen this before.” Fashion’s cyclical nature often causes discussions of the "repetitiveness" of the trends. This time, however, the feeling was different. Instead of boredom, the repetitions felt affectionate. It was less “I’ve seen it before”and more “I’ve seen it before and I remember how good it was back then. I miss it so much.”
Cultural theorist Svetlana Boym identifies two types of nostalgia:
restorative
and
reflective
Restorative nostalgia focuses on nóstos (home) and aims to reconstruct an idealised “golden age” past in attempts to find a “lost home.”
Reflective nostalgia, which is not an absolute opposite to the first one, emphasises álgos (pain) —the bittersweet awareness that the past cannot be truly recovered. Rather than attempting to rebuild what has been lost, reflective nostalgia lingers in memory, embracing its fragments and ambiguities.
Fashion often mirrors society, reflecting cultural, political, and economic shifts. Based on this, AW26 indicates one important thing about the present moment: we are all nostalgic. Many of us for youth; but also for stability. In a world increasingly marked by uncertainty, the past begins to appear comforting. It becomes a symbolic home we wish we could return to.
AW26 felt like both nóstos and álgos were mixed on the runways, revealing both an attempt to recreate the lost home and acknowledging that time can not fully be restorative.
In many ways, the runways and presentations became spaces where time briefly folded in on itself. During a short-lived show, audiences were invited to experience the illusion of returning to another moment — one that felt familiar, comforting, and perhaps even safer than the present.
The sense of homecoming and belonging was a common theme during London Fashion Week. For many designers, nostalgia was deeply autobiographical.
Courtesy Tolu Coker
Ukrainian designer Natasha Zinko recalled her teenage years in Odesa, when she was making jeans with her family to sell at local markets. Although she describes that period as “challenging and complicated,” the collection approached those memories with warmth and tenderness —her parents, Oleg and Margharita, were helping with the creation of this collection.
Similarly, Chet Lo rediscovered Hong Kong, a city connected to his childhood, while American designer Conner Ives closed his show with a bow, wearing an “I Love NY” T-shirt – perhaps an expression of nostalgia for the designer's youth there.
In New York, nostalgia was more about álgos —building something new from the beloved memories. Tory Burch, for example, was trying to do so by returning to the things that were familiar: her AW26 collection was inspired by her dad’s favourite corduroys. American fashion designer Anna Sui revisited the punk scene she experienced during her youth, translating those memories into vibrant, energetic looks.
If some approached nostalgia through personal memory and reflection, others explored its restorative dimension —the attempt to reconstruct or revisit our past.
Creative director of Dries Van Noten, Julian Klausner, openly acknowledged the emotional foundation of his AW26 collection. Speaking to Vogue, he explained that he aimed to capture a particular kind of nostalgia, one many people experience —the nostalgia for our own youths.
“The bell rang and hundreds of teenagers came pouring in, and it struck me how universal and how intergenerational the feeling is, thinking back to high school: a kind of awkwardness and a slight cringe, also a certain joy. Clothes play such an important role in that moment of self discovery.”
- Julian Klausner for Vogue.
Courtesy Dries Van Noten
Photography by Daniele Oberrauch
Adrian Appiolaza approached nostalgia through geography and personal heritage. His collection for Moschino was filled with references to Argentina: places, things, buses and even persons, such as former first lady Eva Perón. For an Italian house known for its irony, the collection may not be Moschino-ish enough. However, it was unmistakably nostalgic enough, with a lot of sentimental sense of nóstos.
Designers also explored nostalgia through the idea of clothing as an emotional archive. Swedish designer Ellen Hodakova Larsson invited us “into a meditation on identity, vulnerability, and self-reflection.” Hodakova transformed the clothes into furniture, which were acting like a literal home for a body, a protective shell from the instability that awaits us outside. Back in London, the debut of Spanish designer Daniel del Valle with his brand Thevxlleydrew attention for its artisanal clothes. But it was also about home: a sculptural top adorned with loaves of bread paid tribute to the designer's baker father, while delicate floral embroideries, dripped with ribbons, were an homage to his grandmother. Clothing here functioned as a storyteller.
Courtesy of Hodakova
Courtesy of Hodakova
Courtesy of Hodakova
Returning for a moment to New York, Marc Jacobs revisited the aesthetic energy of the 1990s and 2000s – decades that are now described as fashion’s “golden era.” Many heritage houses and major fashion names were doing the same this season.
Demna’s first Gucci runway responded directly to a powerful collective memory: the glamorous and provocative era of Tom Ford at Gucci. Ford’s vision still defines the house’s identity for the audience who had an opportunity to live through it. Demna showed not simply a stylistic or marketing gesture, but another attempt to reconnect the brand with a nostalgic moment in its own history.
Courtesy Gucci
At Schiaparelli, creative director Daniel Roseberry brought the audience to the Carrousel du Louvre, the central location of the Paris catwalks during the 1990s and early 2000s. For many industry insiders, the venue carries vivid memories of that period in fashion history. As fashion critic Nicole Phelps – who began covering runway shows in the late 1990s for Women's Wear Daily and now works as the Director of Vogue Runway – observed in her review of the show: “For some in the crowd, it felt like walking back in time; for everybody else, that era in fashion might as well be ancient history. In the everything old is new again way, those years feel fresh again and ripe for reinterpretation.” Returning to this venue, Roseberry may have done something more than present a collection – he allowed the audience to briefly relive one of fashion’s defining stages.
Courtesy Schiaparelli
Interestingly, nostalgia during AW26 also touched the early 2010s.
Even though fashion is cyclical, this cycle was particularly short. If aesthetics come back only a decade later, they can tell us something about the desire to feel the way we did back then: a little younger and freer. Isabel Marant used her AW10 snake prints, while Pierpaolo Piccioli at Balenciaga was clearly referencing his brand’s predecessor, Demna, who started his revolutionary times at Balenciaga in 2014. The oversized and exaggerated silhouettes associated with Demna suggested a specific dimension of nostalgia: the desire to reconnect with the moment when the love story between the admirers and Balenciaga had started.
Phenomenally, the emotional climax of the season arrived with the final collection of Pieter Mulier for Alaīa. The designer is closing his five-year tenure at the French house, founded by Azzedine Alaīa. Mulier was the one who successfully put Alaïa back on the fashion pedestal, reintroducing the brand’s sculptural elegance to the new generation. The collection was a farewell, but it felt sad not only because of that. The palpable nostalgia was caused by a goodbye to a wonderful era that started back in times when everything felt a little more stable than anything right now. This show marked a closure of the chapter, and the audience is already beginning to remember it as the beautiful past.
Courtesy Alaīa
Despite nostalgia’s heartbreaking álgos undertones, reliving and revisiting significant moments from the past can actually bring people comfort and happiness. Fashion appeared to offer precisely that during AW26. Through both the restorativeness and reflectiveness, designers invited us to revisit familiar images and preserve the moment, go back to the past and bring a sense of joy to the chaos of today.
Unfortunately, the season’s attempt to escape to the past revealed something more unsettling:
In a time defined by rapid technological change, political instability, and constant social transformation, the present often feels fragmented. And nostalgia offers a way to return to cherished moments, re-connecting us with the times that appeared more stable – or simply happier – in retrospect.
Some turned inward to personal memory and family history.
Heritage houses, meanwhile, turned to their institutional past:
Bibliography:
