Is Fashion Great Yet?

Fashion’s “great reset” promised disruption. What it delivered was devotion to the throne.

Colin Doerffler at CD HQ (who designed these totes) and I went out in Paris about 10 hours ago, we printed the totes 12 hours ago, and uploaded this post 5 hours ago. All for your enjoyment.

Fifteen debuts in one season promised a “great reset.”

An otherworldly collection by Matthieu Blazy at Chanel. Jonathan Anderson at Dior. Louise Trotter at Bottega Veneta. Demna Gvasalia at Gucci. Duran Lantink at Jean Paul Gaultier. Alessandro Michele at Valentino, and more. A full rotation of musical chairs that looked, on paper, like a generational rewrite of the system.

But when the lights came up in Milan and Paris what emerged felt less like revolution than rearrangement. The Spring/Summer 2026 shows were supposed to be a reckoning: the end of corporate stagnation, a rebirth of creativity, a break from the algorithmic aesthetic that had flattened fashion into content. But the runways told a more nuanced story.

There was beauty, and there was déjà vu. Pierpaolo Piccioli’s Balenciaga reworked Cristóbal’s sculptural grandeur through the lens of Demna Gvasalia’s streetwise irony, while Michael Rider’s Celine split the difference between Hedi Slimane’s precision and Phoebe Philo’s poise. Jack McCollough and Lazaro Hernandez at Loewe nodded to Jonathan Anderson’s rigor, Dario Vitale went back to Gianni’s original version of Versace, and Louise Trotter at Bottega Veneta felt bound by the same gravitational pull of house codes.

It all was a natural consequence of predecessors who built billion-dollar hits too valuable to abandon. The “great reset,” it turns out, wasn’t so much creative as it was ideological. Beneath the beauty, fashion has remembered who really pays the bills, and what that loyalty might cost.

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The False Reset

Fashion has always monetized change, but what it really sells is continuity disguised as revolution. Every few decades, it crowns a new order: Dior’s New Look after austerity, Yves Saint Laurent’s youthquake against the establishment, and Virgil Abloh’s streetwear-luxury wave as democracy in disguise. Each movement reshaped the system, until the system absorbed it.

Spring 2026 was meant to be the next chapter in that lineage: the era that would define what comes after streetwear’s reign. But instead of heralding a new aesthetic, it reflected the unease of its time. A world that is anxious, unequal, and algorithmically flat. What was framed as a reset has become a mirror.

For the past few years, brands have tried to soothe the market with the language of calm, focusing on “quiet luxury,” “authenticity,” and “craft.” It was less a vision than a coping mechanism, an aesthetic of stability in an unstable world. But as uncertainty deepened with growth slowing in China, margins tightening, and politics hardening, even that restraint gave way. The “reset” we’re seeing now is about protection.

Behind this language of restraint is fear: of volatility, of shrinking demand, of being caught on the wrong side of power. So fashion does what it always does when threatened, it retreats to its safest customer. The ultra-rich. The one demographic immune to crisis.

This season’s collections announced this shift on the highest stage. The shows no longer pretend to be democratic. They are built for the 0.1 percent, and this time, you are supposed to see it, no, applaud it.

Now that wealth no longer hides and power no longer apologizes, fashion is deciding it no longer pretends to resist.

The Return of the Court

There’s precedent for fashion’s obedience to power. Versailles was the first luxury economy, where silk and ceremony enforced hierarchy. The Gilded Age turned dress into capitalism’s soft diplomacy, and the 1980s wrapped deregulation in sequins and sold it as success.

But something has shifted. The court has gone corporate. The runway no longer flatters power but functions as part of it. The gowns at Balenciaga, the ballroom silhouettes at Gucci, the “ladies who lunch” looks at The Row are the aesthetic infrastructure of wealth itself beyond commentary. Fashion has become the stagecraft of capitalism, its most seductive form of PR.

Historically, excess invited collapse. The 18th century met the guillotine, the 1920s met depression, the 1980s met 1990s grunge. But revolt no longer seems to erupt. The system has learned to monetize dissent before it can threaten it. Punk is now a print, sustainability boiled down to a SKU, and resistance a campaign.

Fashion has always glorified the rich. The difference now is that it does so without irony, without distance, without guilt. And we applaud it on social media.

The New Court

Fashion has always fed on power with every era having had its patrons. But until recently, luxury kept a careful distance. It served the elite without centering them, translating wealth into taste without the theatre.

The 2010s’ “quiet luxury” was all about optics, not to be confused with morality. After the 2008 financial crisis, understatement became the only socially acceptable form of privilege. Elegance as camouflage.

That camouflage has been discarded. The new court of plutocrats and celebrities-by-proximity no longer hides behind taste when it can flaunt its scale. We see it in Vogue’s Lauren Sánchez and Jeff Bezos cover, where power is reframed as culture; the Arnaults on political stages; Mark Zuckerberg partnering with EssilorLuxottica to design the future of fashion optics. They are coronations of sorts where luxury publicly anoints its new rulers. And they do so proudly.

And now the runways have followed more overtly. This season’s silk ball gowns, gala-ready corsetry, and museum-scale silhouettes are pure function. Clothes designed for the few who still live in spaces vast enough to wear them. Where the previous decade offered the illusion of accessibility (the sneaker, the hoodie, the tracksuit) 2026 has returned to designing for rooms the public will never enter.

Exclusion has always been the subtext of fashion and this season, it became the aesthetic itself.

The Moral Realignment

Fashion once aestheticized rebellion. Now it aestheticizes obedience. The work remains beautiful, but beauty is no longer the sole purpose when output and alignment is. The new ideology of fashion is survival through obedience. Brands behave like tech platforms as a result where smoothing friction, optimizing for reach, and flattering power to ensure protection have become more important.

Now, fashion was never inclusive, it simply performed inclusion through “affordable” fragrances, coffee pop-ups, and livestreams which represented tokens of access for those outside the gates. Now that pretense has vanished. The spectacle no longer invites you in but reminds you where you stand. And the media, desperate for proximity, amplify the faith.

So, Is Fashion Great Yet?

No. It’s efficient, global, and profitable. But greatness requires conviction and the belief that aesthetics can still hold moral weight.

Too many designers no longer design against the system when they design to survive it. Yohji Yamamoto remains one of the few who still resists gravity. His shows are slow, reflective, politically angry, unfashionable in the best sense. “Fashion has become a joke,” he told The Business of Fashion earlier this week. “It’s all about money.” He wasn’t wrong.

This “great reset” was meant to reignite the faith around morality. Instead, we are seeing bigger reveals of the machinery beneath the shimmer. Today, we see an industry where power is slowly performing benevolence while tightening its grip.

And yet, there were still glimpses of what fashion could be. During Paris Fashion Week, The Codes, a posthumous exhibition of the late Virgil Abloh’s work at the Palais de Tokyo, offered a rare sense of sincerity.

Friends, collaborators, and family gathered not for optics but for meaning. His wife and children stood beside pieces that once redefined the bridge between streetwear and luxury. Bella Hadid, Paloma Elsesser, Tremaine Emory, Clint (Corteiz), Benji B, Black Coffee, Sarah Andelman, Skinny Macho, Zack Bia, Jerry Lorenzo, Kevin McIntosh and many other collaborators who helped shape that era reunited in quiet reverence. A true collective outside the spectacle.

And somewhere, that spirit still lives. A reminder that fashion will only be great again when it starts challenging the power it now decorates.