Why fashion’s new class of creative directors is looking to the past to shape the future

A series of high-profile creative directors made their debuts for S/S 2026, putting the future of fashion in the spotlight. Hannah Tindle unpacks ‘fashion’s great reset’

By Hannah Tindle

published 6 February 2026

Contributions from
Liam Warwick - Photography, Jason Hughes

in Features

S/S 2026 new season debut collections photographed at Lanesborough hotel in a seris of images that look like they’e been shot on a film set

Vaslov wears shirt, £790; jeans; tie, both price on request, all by Dior (enquire dior.com). Shoes, £195, by GH Bass (available ghbass-eu.com) Bernie wears dress; hat; shoes, all price on request, by Dior (enquire dior.com)

(Image credit: Photography Liam Warwick, fashion Jason Hughes)

For the S/S 2026 season, the spotlight fell on 15 creative directors. After many months of abrupt departures, sudden arrivals and judicious role-swapping at Dior, Chanel, Balenciaga, Celine, Gucci, Bottega Veneta and Carven – plus new placements at Versace, Jean Paul Gaultier, Mugler, Maison Margiela, Loewe, Jil Sander, Area and Proenza Schouler – those in question unveiled debut collections to an audience that had eagerly coined this unprecedented shift as ‘fashion’s great reset’. But every new beginning comes from another beginning’s end, as the saying goes. And across these debuts, it was the past that would define the future.

However, it was neither sycophantic nostalgia nor a simple rehashing of familiar codes that swept the runways. As the show notes written for Jonathan Anderson’s inaugural ready-to-wear womenswear collection at Dior stated: ‘Daring to enter the house of Dior requires an empathy with its history, a willingness to decode its language, and the resoluteness to put all of it in a box. Not to erase it, but to store it, looking ahead, coming back to bits, traces or entire silhouettes from time to time, like revisiting memories.’

S/S 2026 new season debut collections photographed at Lanesborough hotel in a seris of images that look like they&rsquo;e been shot on a film set — Bernie wears jacket, £1,690; skirt, £800, both by Mugler (enquire mugler.co.uk). Hat, £950, by Noel Stewart (enquire noelstewart.com). Earrings, £1,100, by Jessie Thomas (enquire jessiethomasjewellery.com). Vaslov wears shirt, £790; jeans, price on request, both by Dior (enquire dior.com)

Anderson, who bade farewell to Loewe in March 2025 after 11 years at its helm – a period in which he transformed the languishing Spanish brand into a zeitgeist-defining institution – chose Paris’ Jardin des Tuileries as the location for his highly anticipated reveal. Conceived by longtime Anderson collaborators, director Luca Guadagnino and production designer Stefano Baisi, the white cube-like set featured a pyramid at its centre, on which a video by Adam Curtis was projected. The British documentarian had applied his signature collaging technique to archival recordings of every creative director who had preceded Anderson. And the collection itself also traversed the house’s illustrious history. But whether a restructuring of the Bar jacket, its flared waist manipulated into a blossoming bow, or the cleverly skewed, shrunken proportions of the New Look silhouette, signature Andersonisms (abstracted shapes, off-kilter detailing, surrealistic millinery) made it clear that an ‘inevitable change’ had arrived.

At Celine, Michael Rider followed a similar tack for both his spring 2026 resort collection, which marked his debut, and the ready-to-wear that followed. Speaking backstage after the first presentation, the designer stressed that Celine’s new chapter wouldn’t be marked by ‘a sense of erasure’. He said, ‘There was a foundation to build on. That, to me, felt modern, ethical, strong.’ So, in both offerings, Céline Vipiana’s quintessential silks and entrenched house prints melded with a pinch of Phoebe Philo (oversized shoulders and soft draping, for example), with whom Rider worked during her tenure at the house. There was also a touch of Hedi Slimane’s youthful Parisian sensibility: denim jeans, leather biker jackets and a nod to the dress codes of the 1960s Left Bank. Equally, the Washington DC-born Rider, a former creative director at Polo Ralph Lauren, was claiming Celine as his own with design tropes belonging to preppy Americana: oversized varsity jerseys, leather lace-up pumps and white socks, and knits emblazoned with the brand’s equestrian logo.

At Maison Margiela, Glenn Martens said his S/S 2026 ready-to-wear offering would see ‘new design suggestions appear alongside reintroductions and evolutions of archival ideas’. Like Martin Margiela and the house’s late co-founder Jenny Meirens, Martens is Belgian, and his avant-garde approach was honed at Antwerp’s Royal Academy before taking the reins at Y/Project and Diesel. In the wake of former creative director John Galliano’s lauded era of dramatic spectacle, a gritty ambience returned. For the runway show’s soundtrack, Martens referred to Martin Margiela’s S/S 1990 presentation (held in the Paris suburbs, where local children ran freely among models’ Tabi-clad feet), while his collection put a slant on deconstructed tailoring, slashed and reworked denim, and slope-shouldered leather outerwear, worn by open-mouthed models, their lips stretched using metal mouthpieces evocative of the house’s signature four-stitch motif.

A sort of fashion relay took place at Gucci, Valentino and Balenciaga between Alessandro Michele, Pierpaolo Piccioli and Demna: Michele, formerly at Gucci, handed the baton to Demna, previously at Balenciaga, a house that Piccioli now heads up. For Gucci’s S/S 2026 presentation, Demna chose to save the runway for March this year, instead opting for a lookbook shot by Catherine Opie, titled La Famiglia. ‘La Famiglia is a study of the “Gucciness” of Gucci, an expression of the brand as a mindset and a shared aesthetic language,’ he said. Heritage – the Horsebit loafer, the Bamboo bag, the GG monogram – were now viewed through shades of previous creative directors Michele, Frida Giannini and Tom Ford, with Demna’s unmistakable witticisms the mark of fresh design territory.

Piccioli’s proposition for Balenciaga began with Cristóbal Balenciaga’s ‘minimalist maximalism’, taking the 1957 Sack dress as a starting point from which to unfold history. ‘It would be stupid to deny who has been here before: Demna, Nicolas Ghesquière, Cristóbal,’ he said of the collection, which infused his trademark romanticism with voluminous, cocooning shapes, peppered with a more austere, Ghesquièrian aesthetic.

Matthieu Blazy left Bottega Veneta towards the end of 2024, with Louise Trotter announcing she would be exiting Carven to replace him. Blazy was quickly named as Chanel’s new creative director. Both showed their first collections across September and October. And at Bottega Veneta, Trotter, in her words, ‘return[ed] to the beginning to find the present’. ‘The language of Bottega Veneta is intrecciato. And it is a metaphor,’ said the designer of her vision for S/S 2026. ‘It is two different strips [of leather] woven together that become stronger – the two things make a stronger whole.’ Bottega Veneta is rooted in Italian craft, and Trotter explored this with flair, manipulating fabrics in a continuation of Blazy’s love of movement and texture. Backstage after the show, Trotter also said that one of her inspirations for the collection was Laura Braggion, Bottega Veneta’s first female creative lead, who worked for the house from the 1980s to the early 2000s.

‘I was imagining her journey,’ she said. ‘Her freedom of being an Italian woman, an archetypal Italian woman, moving to New York. And what that experience meant. It was a liberation for her. And that’s what I wanted to capture – a feeling of liberation.’ In billowing trench coats, skirts and dresses, and the undulating, glistening fringing of ombré skirts and ‘sweaters’ formed from recycled fibreglass, the feeling was palpable.

And then, Chanel. Blazy’s invitation to the French fashion house marked the first time that a designer outside of Gabrielle ‘Coco’ Chanel and Karl Lagerfeld’s inner circles would enter its ateliers (Virginie Viard, who had worked closely with Lagerfeld from the 1980s up to his death in 2019, would step down for his arrival). So whether to maintain or disrupt the status quo was a predicament for Blazy. ‘Either we do a clean, modern, by-the-codes, by-the-book Chanel show, and it’s a first step. Or we do this show as if it was our last,’ he told The Business of Fashion. ‘I took the last option. Let’s do a show as if it were the last one.’ Against a vast interplanetary set – an ode to Coco Chanel’s fascination with the cosmos – Blazy cast any staid or fusty remnants of Chanel aside. In their place, lightness and liberation; a breath of fresh air. ‘Above all, there is an idea of freedom, of a new universal dress and a borderless blending of styles,’ he said. ‘The inheritance of not just one Chanel woman, but rather, of Chanel women.’

Across 77 looks, there was a subversion of tailoring, with cues borrowed from Boy Capel, Coco Chanel’s English lover, with whom she would sometimes share a wardrobe; there was also a reimagining of the classic 2.55 bag, which appeared softer, as though crumpled under the weight of history. In a continuation of the trompe l’oeil trickery that Blazy was so fond of at Bottega Veneta, tweed was, in fact, not tweed at all, but thousands of tiny glass beads. The final look – a louche ecru silk T-shirt worn with a cascade of confetti-like organza flowers in the shape of a floor-length skirt – was met with rapturous applause.

The S/S 2026 season has seen fashion grapple with a wider question that it has, perhaps, been trying to avoid in recent years: in a culture of short attention spans, what does ‘newness’ even look like? The answer, for now at least, doesn’t seem to lie in the ‘gimmick’ or the ‘redux’, but in acknowledging the design methods of those who came before as a means to move forward. It’s a return to the art of making clothes and the importance of knowing history well enough to alter it.

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

Model: Bernie Ross at Elite Model Management Actor: Vaslov Goom at Birdston Talent Management Casting: Lucy Rogers Hair: Michael Harding at Blend Management using Oribe Make-up: Sandra Cooke using Chanel Denim Collection and No.1 de Chanel Body Serum Manicure: Megan Cummings at Snow Creatives using Dior Manicure, Le Baume and Vernis Digi tech: John Cronin Photography assistants: Louise Oates, Tamibe Bourdanne Fashion assistant: Lucy Proctor Production assistants: Archie Thomson, Ady Huq, Indy Davy Photographed on location at The Lanesborough, London.

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Hannah Tindle is Beauty & Grooming Editor at Wallpaper*. She brings ideas to the magazine’s beauty vertical, which closely intersects with fashion, art, design, and technology.

With contributions from