The Key Spring/Summer 2026 Trends You Can Already Shop
Fashion, as we well know, is in a state of flux. According to the Business Of Fashion-McKinsey State of Fashion Executive Survey, “challenging” was the word executives used most frequently to describe the fashion industry in 2025, with businesses facing several challenges: from tariff hikes and artificial intelligence to inflation. The pandemic-induced slow down of the industry seems like a distant memory. Across the spring/summer 2026 season, we saw no fewer than 15 debuts take to the international fashion stage in an ongoing game of creative director musical chairs.
Shop the key Spring/Summer fashion trends:
Chloé Double-Breasted Herringbone Blazer
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Heirlome Maggie Double-Breasted Silk Trench Coat
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It’s not all doom and gloom: while constant change might not be conducive to market stability, it has created an opportunity for a new wave of design talent to rewrite the fashion narrative and put their own stamp on some of the world’s most famous houses. Of course, 13 out of 15 of the newly-appointed creative directors were men (that’s a discussion for another time), but it was the two leading ladies that led the charge in shaping 2026’s new vision of luxury.
Louise Trotter’s debut for Bottega Veneta was all anyone could talk about at Milan Fashion Week in September. The designer’s dynamic, tactile fabrics paid homage to the handwoven, “algorithm-proof” design lexicon, which was cemented by Matthieu Blazy during his tenure at the brand. The elevated everyday luxury mood was captured in the collection’s swirling, flame-coloured sweater, which was made out of art installation-worthy recycled fibreglass and styled with white trousers and sporty pumps. “[The fabric] has the feeling of fur and it moves like glass,” Trotter said of the piece. Fashion with feeling, you could call it.
Jamaican-born Rachel Scott, meanwhile, redefined the “lady of leisure” archetype through her first collection for Proenza Schouler via soft draping, uncomplicated separates and a sophisticated colour palette of cream, sea glass-green and burnt orange. Like Trotter, Scott put materials front and centre, combining the brand’s body-skimming silhouettes with the modern bohemia that underpinned the aesthetic of her own brand, Diotima. “This is really a collaboration with the team: getting to know the language of the brand and silhouette and colour, but then starting to inject a little bit of my point of view,” Scott told Vogue Runway. “There are a lot more textures than you would normally see.”
Reinventions weren’t just the reserve of individual design houses, however, as spring/summer 2026 saw the Tumblr-coded “dark academia” trend given a new lease of life – or should we say light – through the literary mood that ran through the collections of Chanel, Celine, Prada and Tory Burch. Blazy’s Chanel has already won over the hard-to-please fashion crowd with its palette-cleansing approach to the house’s historic design codes: think cropped tweed tailoring, woven twinsets and endorphin-fuelled fabrics that were less “brooding student”, more “elegant librarian”. Meanwhile, Michael Rider put an equestrian spin on intellectual dressing at Celine, via his printed silk scarves, nipped-in jackets and jodhpur-inspired trousers.
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