Why did the colour black take over this season’s runways?

Lit by a single strip of cool white, these sharp all-black clothes are staged within scenes from a stark odyssey. They are an exclamation mark. A slash through the disarray of dim biscuit, cloudy nude and wan magnolia.

Across the seasonal collections, designers made a case for the body as a graphic line. At Fendi, a roomy two-button blazer worn over a silk shirt with matching pleated skirt – all in black – hailed Maria Grazia Chiuri as the brand’s new chief creative officer. Chiuri pointed towards her vision: a rigorous, no-nonsense, un-anxious wardrobe. One deftly separated from the gurgling stream of generic, international good taste.

Studies often claim that those who consistently wear all black have more gravitas; they are likely indifferent to the flimsy cycle of trends, considered more reliable, more intelligent, more self-assured. ‘I think we must be pragmatic,’ Chiuri said after her A/W 2026 show, right on cue. ‘Fashion is not entertainment. Fashion is a job. I am that kind of designer.’ Black is potent, seductive and strong. It’s pragmatic.

This season, Rei Kawakubo – a designer as revered for her esoteric sculptural forms as her persuasive retail stores and maverick perfumes – also showed 21 jet-black looks for Comme des Garçons, punctuated by six in sugared pink. Of black, she said: ‘It’s just the strongest, the best for creation, and the colour that embodies the rebellious spirit. And has the biggest meaning: the universe and the black hole.’ Darkness and mourning, daring and chic, depth and solitude. The middle of the eye, the colour of flies, tar and obsidian. Our time calls for serious black. Sensuous black, all-encompassing black. Black as not white. Black that is not vague.

The blueprint of black as shorthand for chic was decided in 1926 when a sketch of Coco Chanel’s calf-length crêpe de Chine dress appeared in Vogue billed as ‘the frock that all the world will wear’. Exactly 100 years later, the four-pocket, five-gold-button trouser suit by the house’s fledgling creative director Matthieu Blazy, photographed here, captures the same kind of clarity. The little black dress with a big new agenda.

In wearing black, one is creating an image. An outline, a silhouette against the world. In 1960, actress Marlene Dietrich arrived for an interview with The Observer wearing a wild mink coat, a black Balenciaga dress, a black tulle hat, black patent leather pumps and a black crocodile handbag. ‘I dress for the image,’ she said. ‘Not for myself, not for the public, not for fashion, not for men.’ A total black look, unadorned and unencumbered by the melee of prevailing fads was, and still is, a declaration of independence.

We all dress for image, albeit for a much smaller screen than Dietrich’s. Becoming an image dressed in black is an exercise in body language; the clothes cannot speak alone. The late Professor Louise Wilson, who as director of the MA Fashion degree course at Central Saint Martins nurtured the careers of some of fashion’s most influential designers, knew this. She was as notorious for her commanding presence and iron will as she was for her signature uniform of all-black: cashmere in winter and linen in summer. Aged ten, she sewed a black tailored jacket and raw-edge, below-the-knee skirt for her Sindy doll and finished it off with a headscarf, patent belt and bag. Our enduring image of Wilson is fixed – and fixated – with her all in black. Wearing it kept the attention firmly on her glittering alumni.

Wearing black is partly a refusal to respond to the changing moods. It is something safe and understood, at times radical and often deeply personal. It is something that means the wearer doesn’t stand out – unless they want to. Both a protective shield and a clarion call.

Arriving in Paris in 1981, the designer Yohji Yamamoto proffered a harder edge and hue to the prevailing collections of the time, which were happily shaping the decade’s women into either campy sculpted sirens or frothy babushkas. Yamamoto’s collection of menswear tailoring for women in black may have irked journalists, but it delighted the public. He refused to drench women in a riot of patterns or drown them under layers of tulle. With black, he was asking us to strip away the superficial emotions and focus entirely on texture and form. Black, he said, was not an absence of colour, but its conclusion.

Away from the whims of fashion, the wearer is energised by its most ubiquitous shade. A head-to-toe black wardrobe is intense because it asks the wearer to do most of the talking. There’s no hiding behind it. The late couturier Azzedine Alaïa always wore head-to-toe black. ‘I rid myself of colour. I only want black,’ he once said. ‘Black is the most important colour for me. It is what I start with when I create a model: it makes the silhouette appear better.’

Poised here on a foamy leather sofa, or curved onto the edge of a shaft of glass, the nakedness of black – its totality – revels in the absence of somewhere to hide. If the whole world is sopping in quiet luxury’s de facto beige – and telling us about it in maddening Technicolor – it’s time for a look that gets right to the point.

A version of this article appears in the September 2026 Style Issue of Wallpaper*, available now in print on newsstands, on the Wallpaper* app on Apple iOS, and to subscribers of Apple News +. Subscribe to Wallpaper* today.

Model: Waleska Gorczevski at Models 1. Set design: Tobias Blackmore at Lalaland. Casting: Franklin Headen. Hair: Christos Bairabas using Oribe. Make-up: Claire Urquhart at Julian Watson Agency using Fenty Beauty. Manicure: Saffron Goddard using Chanel Le Vernis in Coco and Chanel La Crème Main. Digi tech: John Cronin. Photography assistants: Louise Oates, Tamibe Bourdanne, Pete Hargroves. Fashion assistants: Lucy Proctor, Nathan Fox. Set design assistants: Paula Salinas, Aurélie Simon. Production assistants: Archie Thomson, Ady Huq, Indy Davy. Hair assistant: Milita Nagelyte. Shot on location at Studio Wayne McGregor.