The top 12 trends of the fall 2025 season—which range from cozy to cubist and are designed for work and play—somehow manage to navigate smoothly through a time as distorted as a reflection in a funhouse mirror. It’s not that designers are burying their heads in the sand, “You know, it’s in the air, this sort of darkness,” said R13’s Chris Leba, summing up the general mood. It’s no surprise, then, that many collections had a Gothic or Emo sensibility that acknowledged this vibe.
Fight or flight is the instinctual response to fear, and resistance was one of the rallying cries of the season (note the many references to armor). Some designers substituted escapism for physical retreat, conjuring free-flying birds or referencing the comforts of home where you can pull the covers over your head for a little while. Clothes that can cocoon and embrace their wearers were all over the runways, as were soft textures—most notably and inexplicably faux fur—which can activate an ASMR response. Yet if the season were to be personified, it would be as an iron hand in a velvet glove, as control and comfort are contraposed.
At a time when the manosphere is ascendent, power and the female body (or “the accessories of femininity” as Miuccia Prada put it) have become lighting rods. It wasn’t so long ago that women were excluded from the world of work. When they started climbing the corporate ladder in the 1980s—the era that underpins so much of what we are seeing now—they often borrowed from “the boys.” Tailoring, neckties, and linebacker shoulders are back and as big as ever. And concurrent with the fizzling out of Work From Home, the TikTok generation has become fascinated with Dress for Success uniforms, and Working Girl’s Tess McGill, spawning the terms corpcore and office siren.
Sirens are enchanters, and for fall, designers have once again fallen for the hourglass curves of yesteryear. Mae West’s hourglass silhouette inspired Schiaparelli’s Shocking perfume bottle (which in turn influenced Jean Paul Gaultier’s flacons), all torsos that closely resemble a Stockman mannequin, i.e. perfection. With Ozempic in play, beauty ideals seem to be retreating to old standards where traditionally small waists represented discipline and hips (augmented with pads or peplums for fall), fecundity. While some designers sculpted silhouettes, others celebrated the female form by draping the natural body using clothing with no (visible) supports, much like Christo and Jeanne-Claude transformed architectural monuments with cloth. For those simply looking to be immortalized in street style, a touch of neon should do the trick.
